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Yes, but (not trying to in any way discredit half of K&R here) it can be useful to write clever code – ideally for personal projects – to both see what the lang
by sgarland 3y ago
Yes, but (not trying to in any way discredit half of K&R here) it can be useful to write clever code – ideally for personal projects – to both see what the language is capable of, and to learn first-hand why this quote is evergreen.
- williamcotton 3y agoClever code should be wrapped up in a parser and you should approach the process problem from a meta perspective, such as Mr. Kernighan did with his help in writing AWK. Recursive descent, flex/bison, parser combinators… these are the tools to manage complexity. This is why lispers go so nuts once it fully dawns on them the power of manipulating the AST along with any other data structures in the program… it’s just a shame about all those parens! We’re not writing machine code, most are not writing assembly or even C or Rust. Most hit the memory managed languages and it seems our abstraction has stalled, with endless language features applied to our current layer of abstraction. Its like goto programming before better abstractions were discovered.