4 ms·

I'm glad google didn't exist when I learned to code.

• beachy 2y ago
  When I started at Oracle way back in the day, there was no Google. I was charged with building a DSL so that users could specify their own business logic and tax rules. I spent 5 x 16 hour days in a flow state coding in C and emerged with a parser that worked remarkably well, but was hideously slow. After sharing the results with colleagues, one of them told me about lex and yacc. I rewrote it and it went from thousands of lines of code to a couple of configuration files and ran probably 1000x times as fast. Of course if search engines had been around then I could have skipped all those hard steps and that project would have been completed more quickly. But the skills and confidence I got from first doing it the hard way really helped in my career.
  • jessekv 2y ago
    I wonder if whoever gave you that assignment also knew. Sometimes I see a junior dev on what could be considered a "pointless" deep dive, and I keep my mouth shut. It's the software equivalent of making your first kill.
  • tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    I lean't about lex and yacc from the O'Reilly shelf in my local bookshop. The information was available but you had to seek it out.