Taking a compiler theory class did wonders for me as a programmer, even though I am in no way capable of actually writing a compiler without a lot of learning c

Taking a compiler theory class did wonders for me as a programmer, even though I am in no way capable of actually writing a compiler without a lot of learning curve. The real falling-down place for most programmers, I think, is that they have no clue how parsing works. The widespread prevalence of XML/JSON, with convenient libraries, has made data stream construction/parsing a thing of the past (which is good, because most of the data stream protocols I saw were awful, filled with shift/reduce and reduce/reduce ambiguities, basically just giant hand-rolled case statements).