March 2009 Entries
My post a few months ago entitled “DSLs: Definitely a bad idea!” certainly seemed to touch a nerve for some people. What was intended to be a sort of lighthearted throwaway entry engendered a lot stronger reactions than I’d expected. So I thought it might be worthwhile to back up for a second and revisit the issue, address some (though not all) of the comments, and talk about how they connect to how I see M. To start with, yes, of course, I was engaging in a bit of hyperbole by saying that DSLs are a “bad idea.” DSLs...
Having covered tokens vs. syntax, we can now talk about what “kind” of parser generator MGrammar is. As I said in a previous post, if you want the full discussion of parser generators you should really read the Dragon book, but here’s sort of how things go in a nutshell: There are traditionally two ways to interpret grammars: LL and LR. In both cases the first “L” means that the grammars read left-to-right. The second character indicates how the grammar is interpreted: “L” for left-to-right and “R” for right-to-left. An LL parser is also called a “top-down” parser because...
Maybe. Dare had a pointer today to a programming.reddit story that talks about competing versions of a dustup between Joel and Greg Whitten back when Joel used to work for Excel. I could care less who’s right, but the interesting implication of the story is that Joel was the one who came up with the application interface for VBA. I’m not sure that’s entirely true—a lot people worked on VBA—but if it is, he might be responsible for nearly driving a former co-worker insane. When I started at Microsoft, I worked on Access. Access used a version of...