I’ve worked on compilers, I wrote a handbook on them, I’ve given talks in a dozen different countries about them, I ran and hired for a company that was building a compiler
Compilers are not hard. This is a bad teacher. The results are all the proof needed
Compilers was was known to be the hardest CS class at Cornell which was hard as it is.
We were handed a 8-page PDF at the start of sem for a language spec we'd be implementing by the end of sem, split into 6 parts.
On part 5, the median was a 0/100 and most the class failed.