[antlr-interest] acceptance of new ideas (was philosophy about translation)

[Andy Tripp]

Andy,

Thanks for the support. Just to add a little to what you said...

I think the "it's ok to generate less-than-perfect code" mindset is 
especially hard to get
for someone in the compiler crowd. Lex and Yacc where around for, what? 
20 years
before ANTLR came along? 20 years of people using lex and yacc, and 
getting things
to work by trial-and-error because the generated code was unreadable? 
That's crazy!
Thank goodness Terence came along and saw the value in generating 
readable code.

But the compiler crowd is so used to generating assembly, machine code, 
and byte code,
none of which gets any benefit from readability. And of course, it must 
work, 100%.
There's absolutely no question about it.

That's a huge mindset leap to the NLP mindset, which is "Of course 
English to Spanish
is impossible, we'll just do the best we can. The airline software 
developers say
"Of course the problem is NP-complete and our input is massive, that's 
not going to
stop us from doing the best we can to schedule the airplanes." And the 
chess crowd
says "of course the perfect game of chess is impossible, that doesn't 
mean we can't
do better than any human."

The airline software has always been better than humans. The chess 
software has just
passed humans. The natural language translators are still not as good as 
humans, but with
a bit of work, they will be.

Sorry for the ramble :)
Andy