I also tell everyone that I like compilers (I even made my Twitter name “Rona likes compilers”, which got me an interview) because if they later hear about someone hiring for that role, they might think of me.

At interviews for the Compiler Engineer position, when asked about Programming Languages, I Never got anything too deep (nothing about formal verification, for example) but was definitely asked “What is your favorite programming language and why” in multiple interviews. Turns out, if you say brainfuck, you will not get the job. Oops.

In October last year I wrote “will developers care about frameworks in the future?” predicting that LLMs would abstract away framework choice. I was wrong—or at least, wrong about the timeline.

The reality is more interesting and more permanent: React isn’t competing with other frameworks anymore. React has become the platform. And if you’re building a new framework, library or browser feature today, you need to understand that you’re not just competing with React—you’re competing against a self-reinforcing feedback loop between LLM training data, system prompts, and developer output that makes displacing React functionally impossible.

As part of my prep, I read several books, like Engineering a Compiler by Keith D. Cooper and Linda Torczon and the famous Dragon Book (Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools). They were engaging, but they provided high-level overviews that I already knew, so weren’t that helpful for someone who had already taken the classes mentioned above.

For myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period.

An example of the disruptive impact of a hot technology succeeding a cool one is given by Robert Theobald in The Rich and the Poor. When Australian natives were given steel axes by the missionaries, their culture, based on the stone axe, collapsed. The stone axe had not only been scarce but had always been a basic status symbol of male importance. The missionaries provided quantities of sharp steel axes and gave them to women and children. The men had even to borrow these from the women, causing a collapse of male dignity. A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind.

Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute.

Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated.

A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, “high definition.” A cartoon is “low definition,” simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.