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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

That's super interesting. I had to within my first couple years of starting my career (I got tasked with writing a scripting language for a product). I'd guess I've parsed something-or-other --- firewall rules, some weird config file or other, C --- about every couple years. It seems super routine to me. But that's just me!

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I skipped that by choosing lisp as my scripting language. took a day to implement. no complex parser required

for config I used ini files, super simple to parser (and now json so always can use an existing solution)

There are plenty of users for whom having to write configuration in JSON is a significant barrier, either because they find the syntax obtuse or because they want things like comments, multiline strings, or expressions. Using a DSL can be a huge UX improvement in many cases.

I would do it differently today than I did in 1997.

I think it's one of those things, where if you have a hammer in your toolset you'll probably bang on a lot more things :)

I've seldom implemented parsing, since we had Lisp, XML, and now YAML. However, I use language translation all the time.

Generally there has always been some pre-existing parser or a basic regex that took 30 seconds to write that I’ve done that with. Maybe I’m blessed?

Could be! I've never had to draw a Bresenham line, but I'm sure lots of people have. :)

In-memory skiplists, I'm still skeptical of.

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