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Knowing how to build a parser manually will make you much much better at generating, and most importantly debugging, automatically generated parsers.

• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Yes. And once you are done learning every aspect of it, one day you will look yourself in the mirror and you will be 60 years old.
  • benj111 3y ago
    Why do you think people are writing toy programming languages? It's a learning exercise. Sure, if you want to learn to use yacc, or whatever, use yacc. I don't think time efficiency is a useful metric when the overwhelming majority of people is this space aren't doing it for their job, or even because they 'need' to create a new language. Ultimately you could just use python, it'll be faster and more fully featured.
  • furyofantares 3y ago
    I'm not sure why this intuition is so strong, I had it myself before learning this stuff in my early 20s on shipping projects (both existing, and from scratch) and at the end of that I was still in my early 20s. Despite this intuition it's all actually very learnable and my experience is that using a parser generator makes no sense in a professional context and very little sense in a hobby/toy project context.
  • PixyMisa 3y ago
    With any luck that will happen to you sooner or later. Better to have it happen knowing you've mastered some subject.