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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 t
by 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.