[antlr-interest] philosophy about translation

[Andy Tripp]

Anthony W. Youngman wrote:

>
> I think you've missed my point :-) "Regardless of how inherently 
> beautiful it is, if a lot of programmers don't easily "get it", then 
> it's not that great."
>
> If it really *is* great, then the chances are the majority of 
> programmers *can't* 'easily "get it" '.

I disagree. Object Oriented Design is, and always was, great, for 
example. Yet it languished in Smalltalk80 for all those years, and didn't
even really catch on completely with C++, and only became mainstream 
with Java. I myself didn't really "get" OO,
even using C++, until Java came along. It took a mix of a great idea 
*and* a good implementation for OO to become mainstream.

>
> I understand your problems with language translation - I still haven't 
> got to grips with Java, and I'm struggling with Antlr, lexing/parsing 
> etc. Thing is, you've got to learn the tools available to you. And if 
> you're tackling something hard (it sounds like you are :-) then either 
> (a) the task is beyond your abilities, or (b) the task is beyond your 
> tools' abilities, or (c) the tools will be difficult and hard to learn.
>
> You say you're probably in "the top 2% of programmers". In other 
> words, if you think a tool "is great", the chances are that a lot (the 
> majority?) of programmers WON'T easily get it - in fact - quite likely 
> - CAN'T "get it" AT ALL!

I think a tool can be great while being simple enough for most 
programmers (e.g. Java).

>
> So don't dismiss tools because they're hard to grasp. My brother 
> thought Emacs was a user-friendly disaster-area until he really needed 
> a power-editor. Then he realised how friendly it really was ...

I'm not dismissing anything - just griping :)

I think Terence could make a huge leap forward by not thinking about 
ANTLR as "a tool to automate what
a guru would have written by hand", but rather "a tool that hides all 
the details of language manipulation, so that
most any programmer can do it". Most programmers use a compiler without 
ever knowing much more than
"it generates some lower-level code from my code". Similarly, it would 
be nice if most programmers working on
language transformation could use ANTLR without knowing much more than 
"it generates a lexer/parser from
my grammar".

>
>
> Cheers,
> Wol