[antlr-interest] philosophy about translation

Loring Craymer lgcraymer at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 30 09:51:23 PST 2006


Wol--

To your list, I would add d.) tools exist to do the
job, but you have to do some research and thinking to
gain the understanding to use them.  And I would
probably put it towards the top of the list. 
Knowledge is what separates the master from the herd,
and hard problems are usually solved by up front
analysis to define both the skills needed for the
solution and the design approach to be taken.

--Loring


--- "Anthony W. Youngman"
<antlr at thewolery.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> In message <45421853.3080907 at jazillian.com>, Andy
> Tripp 
> <antlr at jazillian.com> writes
> >>> For the record, I had no trouble "getting" LISP
> when I learned it 25 
> >>>years ago. When I started with C++, I don't think
> I
> >>> really "got" OOD, and only started writing real
> OO code when 
> >>>learning Java forced me to. I think the fact that
> LISP never
> >>> became "mainstream" means that it failed to be
> easy enough to grasp. 
> >>>Regardless of how inherently beautiful it is,
> >>> if a lot of programmers don't easily "get it",
> then it's not that great.
> >>
> >>
> >> The trouble is, the "average" programmer is just
> that, average.
> >>
> >> A great programmer can do the work of ten
> ordinary programmers. The 
> >>trouble is, he probably does it with tools that
> are beyond the ability 
> >>the ordinary programmer to "get".
> >
> >Just to be clear, I'm not saying I'm an "average"
> programmer or looking 
> >for tools for the "average" programmer.
> >I might be in the top 2% of all programmers, but
> I'm not in the top 
> >0.1% of language-tools-gurus as Terence is.
> >So I want tools that helps us
> good-programmers-but-not-compiler-gurus 
> >build stuff.
> >I'm not a Terence looking to automate my
> parser-creation task;
> >I'm just an Andy looking to build a language
> translator while barely 
> >knowing the difference between LL(*) and LL(k).
> 
> 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 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!
> 
> 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 ...
> 
> Cheers,
> Wol
> -- 
> Anthony W. Youngman - anthony at thewolery.demon.co.uk
> 
> 



 
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