[antlr-interest] postmortem

[Jim Idle]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org [mailto:antlr-interest-
> bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of Andy Tripp
> Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 9:50 AM
> To: antlr-interest
> 
> * The original poster, having invested a few minutes to vent the
> frustrations of himself
>    and certainly at least a few others who didn't bother, goes on his
> merry way. No
>    ANTLR documentation has changed. 

> No warning message from ANTLR
> saying
>    "you don't have any ^ characters in your grammar, so you'll get a
> flat AST, see the
>    section on building ASTs in the book". 

And just how is the tool supposed to know that that isn't what you want? Deus Ex Machina? :-) I see a lot of suggestions for warnings and errors and so on that surely seem reasonable to the requester, but in fact are specific to their particular situation. If you start spitting out warnings saying "You don't have any ^ characters", all you are going to do is annoy those who know about that, and confuse those that don't. Further, other than giving a link to a precise article on tree construction, there isn't much information you can give out in a line or two of warnings. Further still, at what point does this warning go away? When there are two ^ characters? 7? One on every production? Perhaps you were trying to illustrate a point, but the example isn't a good one.

> Just another newbie who
> didn't
> know how
>    to enhance his grammar to build a decent AST. It's his own fault and
> his own problem,
>    because building parsers is hard, and he just wasn't up to it.

Personally, I enjoy helping people get started and try to invest a little time in doing so. Perhaps this helps to curb my egotistical desire to take over the world Pinky. Most people are willing to take a bit of advice and a few pointers and invest their own time in learning. I think that there are plenty of people on this list that are willing to help anyone. Some people though insist that they know everything already, are well versed in the field but despite this require someone else to write up everything they don't in fact know, for free, and make it available on a "front page". There isn't much you can do about that.

I also personally object to rambling and slightly insulting posts that don't name the tool correctly, are chock full of spelling errors (which isn't really excusable these days), grammatical errors (well, we are not all good at grammar, but one is trying to use a language recognition tool), and are written with the expectation that everyone should drop what they are doing and instantly help. Typos are one thing, I am as guilty of producing those as much as anyone, as I type at 3 million characters a minute but 95% of them are BS :-). However, can one not take a little care over the quality of the post? Is offering a little respect dead in the world?

In all of this there seems to be a tacit assumption that people volunteering their time here did so to help people learn to write recognizers with language recognition tools. For the most part, this isn't true other than its use within a formal education curriculum. So attacking documentation and how-tos, or the fact that no one addressed issue xyz raised by abc doesn't really make any sense. The wiki is open to anyone to add documentation at any level they like and many people don't attack but wish someone would write up a few things, which is an eminently reasonable hope. Some people even write up a few things in their own time.

It also seems reasonable to me that if you want to do anything seriously with such a free and necessarily quite complicated tool, that you might invest a few bucks in a book that will save you a lot of trouble. Sure, it doesn't cover every aspect of everything that everybody needs, but it is a hell of a good starting point. When I first needed to write something with yacc, I had the choice of buying a book for 40 quid, or 93 pints of best bitter (it was a long time ago ;-). So, I had to sponge of friends for the beer.

Nobody is saying "It's his own fault, it is hard", just that it is hard, and that the tool and the site aren't really geared up to be a training ground for this kind of knowledge; it is a bit unfair to berate people for not handing out free training. Not that you personally are saying that particularly, but you have spent an awful lot of time here debating the meaning of words like "syntax", which is no doubt interesting to you, made a presentation about ANTLR (more power to you), but I don't see anything in the Wiki from you that says "All your question about trees belong to us." I don't expect you to have done so, but I don't see why anyone should EXPECT anyone to do so unless they are paying for it.

Jim