I just read this tweet five minutes after stumbling upon my copy of The Dragon Book while looking for something else. Parsers and compilers are very cool! I don't think I've ever needed to build one that required more than Terence Parr's book -- and, that was, like, one time.https://twitter.com/juliaferraioli/status/1075486178797850624 …
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Replying to @generativist
Parsers should 100% be required. CS graduates who didn't study compiler design is how we get weird machines in our bloated ad-hoc soap APIs, Turing complete config files, & people who think php is ok.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @generativist
To beat a dead horse: programming language design is (or should be) a subset of HCI & UX. When it's not treated as such, you get C++ or Java.
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Replying to @enkiv2
I think most of the accumulating cruft is a symptom of deadlines, frenetic development, and weird team structures/rewards, not a lack of theory. But, I agree with the HCI/UX/PLT intersection -- especially if it helps wish C++ and Java into the cornfields.
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Replying to @generativist
Right. I don't mean to imply that the folks behind either aren't familiar with theory. The lens of communication-between-human-and-machine is clearly an afterthought (below concerns about performance of internals), while IMO that should be the primary concern of any language.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @generativist
Not even just computer languages. Any constructed mechanism for expressing meaning -- formal languages, cant, orthography -- should be designed to express what it is meant to express in a way that is clear to its intended audience, with a minimum of accidental noise.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @generativist
And, the author themselves should always be part of that audience.
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Especially the author in 6 months to a year!
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