3 ms·

It's too bad the relevant technical details of the story were overwhelmed by what felt a lot like arrogance and contempt for anyone without extensive experience

• gaius 17y ago
  If you need arrogance and contempt, ESR's your boy.
• CapitalistCartr 17y ago
  To be fair, a parser shouldn't by written by "anyone without extensive experience with parsers," and it was unethical for his company to sell such a thing.
  • maximilian 17y ago
    I know that until, say, 3 years ago, I wouldn't know a thing about parsers, and if they boss wanted a scripting language, I would have parsed the whole thing by hand in C. It would have been a total nightmare to maintain (and develop) and would have been awful. Now I know about lex and yacc and I know what a parser really is. If everybody at the company was a bunch of random engineers or something with no experience with language design or parsers, its totally understandable that something like that could happen.
• sethg 17y ago
  You don't need "extensive experience with parsers" to do what the OP is describing. Lex and yacc (and their moral equivalents in other languages) were written precisely so that a programmer of ordinary skill could write a parser and feel reasonably confident that it would behave properly. I've done this kind of thing more than once, even back when I was fairly junior as a programmer.
• camccann 17y ago
  I think it was more along the lines of "contempt for anyone who, when asked to write code to do something difficult that they're unfamiliar with, chooses to write very, very bad code instead of learning the bare minimum needed to do a passable if amateurish job". For what it's worth, a day or two reading a decent textbook would provide sufficient "extensive experience with parsers" to avoid most of the horrible mistakes described. Intolerance for egregious unprofessionalism and incompetence is not exactly something our field suffers due to an excess of.