As the author of this PDF, it's been interesting seeing people guess at the rationale behind its design. However, the rationale had nothing to do with theory vs practice, and everything to do with pragmatically coping with an unaccommodated disability in academia. (1/16)
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.