On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:

On 3 May 2010, at 19:34, Jorden M wrote:
I've yet to find out why this happens so much, but I think I can
narrow it to a combination of ignorance, laziness, and perhaps that
all-too-frequent assumption `oh, I can do this in 10 lines with perl!'
I guess by the time you've written half a parser in line noise, it's
too late to quit while you're behind.

I think it's ignorance and something. I'm not sure what that something is. I am sure if you tried to suggest writing a parser to many of the open-sourcers I've talked to you would be treated as if you were suggesting a big job rather than a small one. "Why Write a Parser," they would ask, "when I can just scribble a few little lines of perl?"

I'd think it's simply not knowing that there are easier ways of doing it. It is just not taught. Also, people learn about parsers in that really scary module about compilers and never give them a second thought afterwards. And anything else to do with strings is usually hopelessly complicated stuff involving indices into character arrays.

Then there's the "kudos" of writing write-only code. Even the writer doesn't understand it anymore, but nobody else knows that, so ...

I always found it a wee bit sad that Icon (http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/) never really had much of an impact in the "let's take this string apart" problem domain. If I need something quick and dirty, it's my "secret" tool for "parsing" stuff quickly. String scanning is trivial.

Robby