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Comment by xal | Hacker News Reader

Fun story about the OP: We brought Tristan on as a high school intern at Shopify. I heard about how fantastic he was off and on during his internship (I’m founder and CEO).

So when I heard that he was giving a town hall talk at the end of his stint I definitely wanted to check it out.

What I walked into was a 30 minute take down of Liquid, the template language that I wrote. He systemically took every single design decision I made and dismembered it based on language design fundamentals.

That was still one of my favorite townhalls. As a self taught programmer it also send me to read about compiler and language theory for the next years to better understand all the errors of my ways. Thanks Tristan!

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Thanks tobi <3

I remember hearing you mention my talk when I was back at Shopify a couple years later (context for others: my first internship I was in grade 11 but I went back 2 times, Shopify is great) and realizing that at many other companies giving a talk in front of everyone about design flaws in the CEO's code would be a career limiting move. But I think it's a testament to Shopify's culture that this never occurred to me in grade 11 and in fact it was instead appreciated.

Hah, that's great. This is the kind of humility that keeps me coming back to hN.

Fancy seeing your comment just as I’m listening to Shane Parrish interviewing you on his podcast (to others: The Trust Battery episode, recommended). Respect & keep up the good work!

Can you share the critique? It would be an interesting read.

Basically, all the parsing is based on unanchored regexes. This means that Liquid will just ignore syntax that doesn't match what it expects instead of giving a syntax error.

One example is `{% if this && that %}`, which is not the correct syntax for logical and but people write in Liquid templates and see that it doesn't give an error so expect it to work, but actually it acts the same as `{% if this %}` and just ignores the invalid suffix.

Thanks!

It’s been a long time. If you ever saw the JavaScript “wat” talk, you get the idea.

We have since rewritten liquid mostly in C and it has a strict parser mode that’s done with proper approach instead of my hacky regexp based approach.

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