That’s what I expected this article to be about - it looks like it’s actually a long-form sales pitch for ANTLR training (but still worth a read). I’ve never been fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be called on to put together a real compiler since school, but I’ve spent a lot of time working with “lite” parsers like JAXB and Hibernate (or variants thereof), and I’ve come to the same conclusion: I’m better off just hand-rolling my unmarshalling code than dealing with the gaps left by code generators.