Jonathan Blow wrote his own game enginee and for that he wrote his own programming language.

He went through straight recursive descendant parser and said same thing.

I think compiler courses teach from yacc, bison etc that's where this whole thing came from but in practice people discovered that hand written recursive descendant parsers are all you need.

> I think compiler courses teach from yacc, bison etc that's where this whole thing came from

Very true. I have a shelf full of books on compiler development and optimization. I have read them selectively, a chapter here, a chapter there. But that shelf is useless for a vast majority of people.

You might find it useful if you are developing a production-level compiler/vm (I cannot make this statement with a straight face while Python rules the world). But a simple and sensible architecture that uses recursive-descent parsing takes you a long way.

Most hobbyist compilers (and even some production ones) are written as a heavy front-end compiling down to C or LLVM. Very few people actually write their own backend.