So true. The thing that put me on the path of discovering parsers was a tweet that said something to the effect of “if you want any relatively complex regex, what you actually need is a recursive descent parser”.
Now as a self thought dev I haven’t really been shown in school what those were and always thought of them as some wizardly magic that only compiler writers dabble in.
I once worked on a product where the idea was the end user would write a lot of custom regexes to parse the output of commands on network devices. The system was written in such a way that the regexes were nested and looped depending on the depth of the output. The overall result is you could read and update config on a device based on what output of these regexes.
It seemed bizarre to me that it was considered an appropriate solution. The end users were network engineers so they were _able_ to write the regexes but it seemed obvious to me that providing the user with a higher level parsing library would be much easier. It was something I wanted to POC but never found time in the end.
I have a CS degree but we just never really covered parsing or compiling at all, for whatever reason (well... technically we talked about the formal theory behind grammars a little bit but we never did anything with it, and it hasn't really been useful at all)
But I always dreamed of making a programming language so one of my pandemic projects was to read Crafting Interpreters, and ever since then I've been a little bit obsessed
That's a great point about regexes! I'll have to keep that one in mind
Now as a self thought dev I haven’t really been shown in school what those were and always thought of them as some wizardly magic that only compiler writers dabble in.
But after that tweet I looked around and discovered https://github.com/dmaevsky/rd-parse which is a 100-ish line library, and using it you can do https://github.com/dmaevsky/rd-parse-jsexpr/blob/master/src/... which is a 200-ish lib that parses all of freakin JS expression syntax.
Now whenever we have various custom unwieldy regexes to parse some input, I can refactor that into a clean and easily understandable parser.
I guess thats why you need at least a little bit of formal education in CS.