This article sums it up perfectly. I was interested in building a compiler long before going to college and this was the most accessible body of work.

Building a recursive descent parser from scratch was an eye opener to 17yo me on how a seemingly very complex problem that I had no idea how to approach can be made simple by breaking it down into the right primitives.

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xyproto 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"breaking things down into the right primitives" is the real key to programming. There are many books and web pages about algorithms, but I wish there were more searchable and browsable resources for how to approach problems through primitives.

	▲	zwnow 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The process of breaking a complex problem down into the right primitives requires great understanding of the original problem in the first place. Whats blocking me during programming usually are edge cases I had no idea about. Its still hard to find good material on compilers if you are not into reading dry ass books. Thats a me problem though, I simply cant force myself to read boring factual only content (one of the reasons as to why I love beejs guides).

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scotty79 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When I need to parse something nowadays I always end up with parser combinators. They just make so much sense.

	▲	mutkach 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What language do you use parser combinators in, and what kind of grammar do you parse usually? Nom was terribly verbose and unergonomic even by Rust's standards. Haskell's Megaparsec/Parsec is good but yeah, it's Haskell, you need to handle multiple monads (Parser itself is monadic, then your AST state, and maybe some error handling) at once and that's where I got confused. But I appreciated the elegance. I experimented with PCs in Haskell and Rust (nom), then moved on to parser generators in Rust (pest.rs), Ocaml (Menhir), Haskell (Happy) and finally ended up with python's Lark - the speed of experimenting with different syntax/grammars is just insane.

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fuzztester an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>a seemingly very complex problem that I had no idea how to approach can be made simple by breaking it down into the right primitives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

From the Publications section of that Wikipedia page:

>The April 1971 Communications of the ACM article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement",[22][23] concerning the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering.[24] The paper is considered to be the earliest work to formally outline the top-down method for designing programs.[25][26] The article was discussed by Fred Brooks in his influential book The Mythical Man-Month and was described as "seminal" in the ACM's brief biography of Wirth published in connection to his Turing Award.[27][28]