How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days

I really enjoyed reading this. It's informative, fun, and has a refreshingly honest tone. Too often, stories passed around by computer scientists entail clever solutions and elegant insight striking the protagonist like lightning in the hour of need. Rarely does the programmer express regret, make self-corrections, and confront fear and doubt along the way:

>I should have written beautiful code from the beginning, but because I needed to learn by writing a working code, the rewriting was unavoidable.

>I should probably change my mind to implement all the features from end to end. I may find it fun as I'm approaching the goal. Sometimes, I have to write more code than I want to write in order to achieve a goal.

>In a tough situation like this, I probably should recall the fact that the compiler was just in one file, to see how much progress I've made in a month. It just reads an integer with scanf() and prints it out with printf(). Really, I made so much progress in one month. Yeah, I think I can do this.

There's a lot of this going on over at /r/adventofcode, people are abusing the hell out of languages just to get their answers as quickly as possible to make the leaderboard.

For those of you who don't know what Advent of Code is, think of it as the advent calendar you had as a child (you know that thing with the chocolate behind the paper doors?), except you get a new coding problem every day and you get stars instead.

https://adventofcode.com

"Rarely does the programmer express regret, make self-corrections, and confront fear and doubt along the way:"

I agree with that part. You know you're looking at genuine science or art in software development when you see those things. Because they're always there tackling new, hard problems.