I am the last one to defend using Java as a teaching language.

The professor in the OP seems to be angry that there are people who spend their time doing things other than making toys for the Pentagon, and I say I don't give a hoot about his Ada silliness.

I was in fact a student who took his compiler class 12 years ago in NYU. A lot of students didn't like his classroom presentation because he would rather talk topics that was not covered inside textbooks (books are for reading at home for homeworks and project). And his class is a project based so in fact the only factor for the grade is the project. I had to write a code generator for GCC AST tree to x86 assembly in the subset of Ada that I chose. In fact, the only exciting part is to write this backend, which is beyond descriptions unless you did that.

He just belongs to a very old school in this discipline that holds the belief that you need to know what are you building from the lowest level components. You don't need to be an expert unless you work in that domain. But at least you are not clueless.

My recollection may be wrong. But I thought his Ph.D. was in fact in Chemistry. And he built and sold Cobol compilers before he worked on SETL language and Ada.

You are correct. Like I mentioned in this comment stream, I also took his class. This was 5 years ago. I have to say that I learned a ridiculous amount of low level systems stuff from his classes, and very much enjoyed his classroom presentation - I completely agreed with his view that a professor is there to present his expert opinion on the topic that may very well be different or tangential with the curriculum that gets covered by you doing the reading.

I was more attracted to project based courses when I was there in graduate school. Other professors that I liked very much, one is Ken Perlin and another is Denis Zorin. It was the real learning experience to build graphic stuffs from scratch.

I didn't take Dennis Shasha's class. But his heuristic learning and distributed computing are also project based.

Although he has an odd way of expressing his opinion (and mostly appears mistaken ) I think his teaching would be very interesting and I would definitely listen to it if I had a chance.

I wonder how much of this is headline grabbing (which is fair enough, it will help enrollments perhaps of the smarter students I think).

I don't think he is active teaching now. He holds emeritus now so he has no duty to teach unless he wants. He probably spends most his time working on AdaCore and its spinoff. I suspect his attitudes is due to his father's influence, who was a very famous organic chemistry researcher Michael J. S. Dewar.

In fact you can learn the similar experience just by doing a project yourself. I learned most stuffs in my life from projects. A course just gives a pressure to finish something before deadline. PG and YC are using the demo day to push applicants to finish something and with a potential payoff for finishing it. (Why? because of human nature tends to procrastinate!)

So maybe you just pick a non-trivial but not too difficult problem (Unless you aim for Turing Award and wants to be the first one to prove/disprove P = NP), find some friends/comrades who wants a challenge. Set up a deadline and payoff and go for it. You learn by doing it and the more you do it, the easier it will be.

So I guess that kinda shows that uni teaching should not be too vocational, other then for team/assignment/project work. Sounds reasonable. I pretty much had to learn C in that context, of projects etc, (we weren't initially taught it, we were taught other languages, and when it came time for C they threw the K&R book at us and said "off you go").