BuffaloFeeds » Comments for Josh the Outspoken » July 2008

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Comments for Josh the Outspoken (32 unread)

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Matt Brubeck

  Posted: July 30th, 2008, 12:44pm MDT by Matt Brubeck

  Apparently it could be worse.

• 

  Comment on Gazelle is (at least briefly) the most powerful top-down parser generator there is by Adrian Thurston

  Posted: July 30th, 2008, 11:01am MDT by Adrian Thurston

  Hi Josh, you should have a look at the generalized top-down parsing algorithms. These algorithms handle any grammar except those with left recursion. Some of them also include additional hacks for dealing with left recursion. Algorithms/technologies to look at: GRDP, Unger’s Method, Combinatorial Parsing, Packrat Parsing, DCGs and TXL, Not all of these are practical, but since they are general (barring left recursion) and LL(*) is not, any tool that implements these parsing methods must be more powerful than Gazelle.

• 

  Comment on A partial retraction to my last entry by Matt Brubeck

  Posted: July 29th, 2008, 9:41am MDT by Matt Brubeck

  “So although my result isn’t as theoretically significant as I thought, I think that from a practical standpoint I’m still in good shape: I have a terminating algorithm that can handle a very useful set of grammars.”

  If you’re after theoretically significant, all you need to do is come up with a name (”LL(haberman)”) and ideally some proofs or properties for the set of grammars your new algorithm does recognize.

• 

  Comment on Gazelle is (at least briefly) the most powerful top-down parser generator there is by josh

  Posted: July 28th, 2008, 11:12am MDT by josh

  @maetl: thanks! It’s funny, when I started writing Gazelle, I believed pretty strongly in that mantra (”parsing and grammars are amongst the most studied and well understood areas of computer science”). I didn’t expect to invent any new algorithms, I mainly just wanted to take existing algorithms and give them different packaging.

  But before long I was trying to figure out if I could improve on the properties of those algorithms that made them less that ideal from a user perspective. I studied the documentation from existing tools and looked at the cases they said they couldn’t handle, and tried to figure out if I could handle them. And before I knew it, I had thought of a new algorithm!

  @Kay: thanks! I agree that having the tool be able to tell you definitively that it is not LL(k) or LL(*) will make things much more user-friendly. I could still use a bit of work on error messages that give you every bit of information about *why* it was not LL(k) or LL(*). In the future I should be able to draw pretty graphs that make the problem obvious. That will take a bit of work, but it’s totally doable, and I think will make for a compelling user experience.

• 

  Comment on Gazelle is (at least briefly) the most powerful top-down parser generator there is by Kay Roepke

  Posted: July 27th, 2008, 10:23pm MDT by Kay Roepke

  That’s great news!

  I just love “tell you definitively when a grammar is not LL(k) or LL(*) (others make you tweak search depth constants)” which can be a hassle currently, especially if the cause is not immediately obvious.

  All power to innovators!

• 

  Comment on Gazelle is (at least briefly) the most powerful top-down parser generator there is by maetl

  Posted: July 27th, 2008, 8:18pm MDT by maetl

  Well done Josh…

  Great to see that you’re not content to let the standard dogma that “parsing and grammars are amongst the most studied and well understood areas of computer science” get in the way of making new implementations in this field…

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Matt Ellsworth

  Posted: July 24th, 2008, 7:34am MDT by Matt Ellsworth

  thats hillarious! It seems that it is a great thing that you guys all were able to get together.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by No One

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 10:21am MDT by No One

  You’re on StumbleUpon now…

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Matt Brubeck

  Posted: July 21st, 2008, 9:39am MDT by Matt Brubeck

  Wow! I was on the list, but I didn’t realize until the blog posts came how many people I knew (or knew of) were on there too. For example, this is my second random encounter with Andres Conbere, who I met once on the bus when he spotted me using my XO. And I had just recently started reading the Enfranchised Mind blog by fellow 416er Robert Fischer.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Chris Martin

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 10:03am MDT by Chris Martin

  I was on this failbot’s list too. As I was hitting reply all this morning to send him a “nice” message, I then saw the flood of emails from like minded developers.
  Hilarious.
  Another item on the long list of why I hate recruiters.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Gregory Foster

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 9:51am MDT by Gregory Foster

  Thanks for blogging it. BTW, your ladybugs are hawt. Clicking them made me feel almost as dirty as hitting reply all.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by sean

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 7:41am MDT by sean

  truly epic. at first it read like a WoW forum thread but as people began to realize that it was mostly other coders they began to grasp the potential. Law of unintended consequences ftw!

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Sarah

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 7:16am MDT by Sarah

  Whoo, I was one of the elite, what, bazillion on that email list? I just joined the Google Group.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Taryn East

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 6:54am MDT by Taryn East

  Actually, this was especially amusing for me as I just put a message out I was looking for a new gig. I didn’t expect that big a response

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by MattKatz

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 6:44am MDT by MattKatz

  Hadn’t other folks been spammed by prodigus tech before? I’ve gotten a couple of other emails like this, but never had the pleasure of meeting my compatriots.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by More Light! More Light! :: More Horrible Recruiters

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 6:40am MDT by More Light! More Light! :: More Horrible Recruiters

  […] morning, my inbox melted into a thin runny gruel due to the amazing incompetence of Prodigus Tech. Also, to feed google a bit, Max Archie is a […]

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Taryn East

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 6:40am MDT by Taryn East

  Agreed - most fun I’ve had from a cascading spam.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Ernie Oporto

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 4:10am MDT by Ernie Oporto

  My life was on a downward spiral. Then Pradipta’s Rolodex came along and changed everything! In just hours, I had 416 friends and millions in cash. Thanks, Pradipta!

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Anders Conbere

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 1:22am MDT by Anders Conbere

  Thank you so much for capturing the surprise and joy that this little gem was

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by chovy

  Posted: July 18th, 2008, 12:12am MDT by chovy

  Haven’t had this much fun online since the World Series playoff game when the IRC channel created the first “Screwing your team out of world series berth? Priceless” photo of that kid interfering with the last out for the Cubs, costing them the playoffs.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Timothy Jones

  Posted: July 17th, 2008, 11:43pm MDT by Timothy Jones

  I was one of the 416 on that posting… It was pretty fun. When you don’t live in one of the big tech cities, it’s easy to feel isolated, not going to conferences, not having killer user groups, not having any clueful employers….

  Then all of a sudden, THIS happens!
  Just goes to show that even incompetence can be helpful sometimes!

  See you on Pradipta"s Rolodex!

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Roger Rohrbach

  Posted: July 17th, 2008, 11:37pm MDT by Roger Rohrbach

  One wit among the recipients has created a Google Group called “Pradipta’s Rolodex,” to which all spammed are invited.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Poutine

  Posted: July 17th, 2008, 11:36pm MDT by Poutine

  Yeah, this is pretty damn hilarious. Best spam I’ve had in a while.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Chris Lemcke

  Posted: July 17th, 2008, 11:34pm MDT by Chris Lemcke

  I, too, was on the Pra-dex list, and what a cool thing to see! I’m glad I decided to check my email when I did.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Austin Smith

  Posted: July 17th, 2008, 11:34pm MDT by Austin Smith

  I made this URL the homepage of the Google Group; hope that’s cool.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Mark Lastname

  Posted: July 17th, 2008, 11:30pm MDT by Mark Lastname

  Haha. It was fun. We have a Google Group now.

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Hank

  Posted: July 17th, 2008, 11:29pm MDT by Hank

  This is awesome. Don’t miss the google group!

  [groups.google.com]

• 

  Comment on 416 Random People with RoR on their resume + Reply All = Reverse Flash Mob by Jason Morrison

  Posted: July 17th, 2008, 11:27pm MDT by Jason Morrison

  Hello there, fellow PR member! This is amazingly entertaining. I should have been asleep an hour ago! Can’t wait to see where it goes.

• 

  Comment on 100 lines of C that can parse any Protocol Buffer by josh

  Posted: July 12th, 2008, 1:46pm MDT by josh

  @Matthias,

  Maybe I wasn’t clear enough: my 100 lines of C does not use any protobuf library. It actually implements the decoding of a protobuf from scratch, and has no external dependencies except for the standard C library.

• 

  Comment on 100 lines of C that can parse any Protocol Buffer by Matthias

  Posted: July 12th, 2008, 1:42pm MDT by Matthias

  This should be much shorter. Create a new FileDescriptorProto with one empty DescriptorProto. From that create a FileDescriptor, lookup the “empty message” descriptor, create a DynamicMessage from that and parse the input. The unknown fieldset contains the fields.

  Actually, in Java you can directly parse an UnknownFieldSet.

• 

  Comment on Why Gazelle Matters, part 2 by josh

  Posted: July 9th, 2008, 4:06pm MDT by josh

  Hi Don,

  I’m not sure that I agree that languages like Haskell are the best for compiler writing. But then again, my project (which I intend to be very very good at it) is still partially vapor, so I can’t make any grandiose claims about being better than Haskell in this problem domain. Yet.

  But for your second point, you seem to be missing the N^2 vs. N+N argument I was trying to make. Sure, of course you can write bindings. I’ll ignore for a moment the practical matters of what it means to embed Haskell into your process and just assume that bindings are a practical and compelling solution.

  Even if I grant you that, writing bindings for each language pair that you want to parse from/to is madness! It takes N^2 work. If you do things my way, you have to write:

  - a parser for C
  - a parser for Haskell
  - a parser for JavaScript
  - Gazelle bindings for C
  - Gazelle bindings for Haskell
  - Gazelle bindings for JavaScript

  At that point, I can parse Haskell from JavaScript, or C from Haskell, or any of the N^2 combinations, but it only took me N+N work. If I do things your way, to get the same functionality, I have to write:

  - a parser for C
  - a parser for Haskell
  - a parser for JavaScript
  - C bindings for the C parser
  - C bindings for the Haskell parser
  - C bindings for the JavaScript parser
  - Haskell bindings for the C parser
  - Haskell bindings for the Haskell parser
  - Haskell bindings for the JavaScript parser
  - JavaScript bindings for the C parser
  - JavaScript bindings for the Haskell parser
  - JavaScript bindings for the JavaScript parser.

  Bindings aren’t trivial. So at the end of the day, since no one is actually going to do the N^2 work, the Language.C person will say “sure, you can use my library, all you have to do is write bindings!” and the person will decide that bindings are too much work for the return you get (because they are), or they’ll be partially written and sporadically maintained bindings that aren’t useful to anyone else, and we’ll keep having the fragmented parser landscape we have today.

  Or I’ll finish Gazelle and that pain will be a thing of the past.

• 

  Comment on Why Gazelle Matters, part 2 by Don Stewart

  Posted: July 9th, 2008, 3:48pm MDT by Don Stewart

  Of course, Language.C is done in Haskell because strongly typed,
  functional languages with algebraic data types and pattern matching are
  particularly well suited to the task of language processing. They’re are
  a sweet point for compiler writing.

  That said, Haskell’s perfectly interoperable with C, or Python, or
  anything that understands the C calling convention, so you could just
  bind to Language.C from other languages (much as others bind to CIL, yet
  another C parser/analyser, this time in OCaml).

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