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PL Theory makes you start looking at everything like a PL problem. APIs become little languages, and rich APIs become larger ones. Parsing becomes trivial, lexi
by discardable_dan 3y ago
PL Theory makes you start looking at everything like a PL problem. APIs become little languages, and rich APIs become larger ones. Parsing becomes trivial, lexing even moreso, and everything sort of devolves into thinking about interpreter state. Then it gets frustrating because you can't just pick up the API interactions and rewrite them more-efficiently, and you end up chasing your own tail wishing you could.
I think it's made me a better programmer, but it must be tempered by understanding the limitations of how and when languages are worth building.
- parentheses 3y ago++ it’s a god mental workout.
- afr0ck 3y agoI once did a distributed systems internship. I am a very pragmatic low-level kind of person. Abstraction is very hard for me to process if I can't see how it manifests in real life. There was a senior PL guy in the team and he was literally modeling every problem according to PL theories. He sees everythings as algebraic structures and tries to explain everything in terms of state machines, parsing, interpreting,etc. My job was a very low level distributed networking where I need to work on Linux kernel networking stack and virtual networking techniques and software (tap/tun devices, VPNs, etc). I just could not work with that guy. I am thinking in terms of IP addresses, network devices, packets and memory pages over the network, but he was thinking in terms of algebra and parsing. I could not properly communicate with him and I had extremely hard time to translate and map his modeling theory to the actual tools and processes I need to do the job. He was senior and had much more influence than me in the team. I ended up quitting the team because of the huge gap in terms of problem modeling and thinking process.