Comment by jerf

I think it's easy in all the superficial churn of frameworks and languages to forget how much depth there is in our field. To me, writing a compiler isn't that big a deal anymore; it's the kind of exercise I might use to try a new language out. But when I was a sophomore in college, even after a few years of computer usage, it would have been magic to me.

It takes a lot of work to get to the point of skill demonstrated in this article... but there's still a lot of skill runway beyond that level of skill, too. It's simultaneously true that this is an impressive amount of talent, and that there are people for whom this would be an entertaining momentary side diversion from their normal job.