S9:E4 - "Confused about compilers?"

For our final episode, we answer your burning questions including the Base.cs origin story, Saron and Vaidehi's favorite niche data structure, and what are some good resources to check out next. We also take a look back at some of our favorite moments from the show's history, and find a couple of fun themes. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Base.cs".

We've been talking a lot about the differences between compilers and interpreters, and how both of them work, and the ways that allowed one — the compiler — to lead to the creation of the other — the interpreter. Now we get into the Just In Time compiler, or a JIT, which is fusion or combination of the interpreter and the compiler, which are each two types of translators in their own right. A just-in-time compiler has many of the benefits of both of these two translation techniques, all rolled up into one. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "A Most Perfect Union: Just-In-Time Compilers".

We have been talking a lot about compilers, and in this episode we discuss the differences between compilation versus interpretation. An interpreter is also a translator, just like a compiler, in that it takes a high level language (our source text) and converts it into machine code. However, it does something slightly different: it actually runs and executes the code that it translates immediately (inline) as it translates. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "A Deeper Inspection Into Compilation And Interpretation".

In this episode, we take our parse tree, an illustrated, pictorial version of the grammatical structure of a sentence, and we take a metaphorical broom to sweep away repetitive bits, sliming it down, and leveling it up by creating an abstract syntax tree (AST). Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Leveling Up One’s Parsing Game With ASTs".

In this episode, we get into what a compiler is and does. In short, a compiler is a program that reads our code (or any code, in any programming language), and translates it into another language. You'll want to listen in to find out just how it does this! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Reading Code Right, With Some Help From The Lexer".

In this episode, we get into parse trees, an illustrated, pictorial version of the grammatical structure of a sentence, which is important to understanding how computers understand coding syntax. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Grammatically Rooting Oneself With Parse Trees".

We continue our journey with the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), where this we imagine a salesperson has to travel to every single city in an area, visiting each city only once. Additionally, they need to end up in the same city where they starts their journey from, and do this in the most efficient manner. However, in this episode, we are going to speed our salesperson up by using a bottom-up approach! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "The Trials And Tribulations Of The Traveling Salesman".

We start our season off with something that often pops up in technical interviews: the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). In this problem, a salesperson has to travel to every single city in an area, visiting each city only once. Additionally, they need to end up in the same city where they starts their journey from. Find out how to make our salesperson do this in the most efficient way possible! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "The Trials And Tribulations Of The Traveling Salesman".

In this last episode of the season we continue our discussion of dynamic programming, and show just how efficient it can be by using the Fibonacci sequence! Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Less Repetition, More Dynamic Programming".

In this episode we talk about different paradigms and approaches to algorithmic design: the Divide and Conquer Algorithm, the Greedy Algorithm, and the Dynamic Programming Algorithm, which remembers the subproblems that it has seen and solved before so as not to repeat doing the same thing over again. Based on Vaidehi Joshi's blog post, "Less Repetition, More Dynamic Programming".