This article sums it up perfectly. I was interested in building a compiler long before going to college and this was the most accessible body of work.
Building a recursive descent parser from scratch was an eye opener to 17yo me on how a seemingly very complex problem that I had no idea how to approach can be made simple by breaking it down into the right primitives.
xyproto•21m ago
"breaking things down into the right primitives" is the real key to programming. There are many books and web pages about algorithms, but I wish there were more searchable and browsable resources for how to approach problems through primitives.
statictype•28m ago
Building a recursive descent parser from scratch was an eye opener to 17yo me on how a seemingly very complex problem that I had no idea how to approach can be made simple by breaking it down into the right primitives.
xyproto•21m ago