Hi everyone, I’m Dave. I’m an independent educator, book author, and researcher based in Chicago. My early background was in computational physics, but I caught the bug of compilers, programming languages, and other matters back in the 1990s when I created the Swig compiler for interfacing C/C++ code with scripting languages. I’m probably most known in the Python world where I maintain two separate LALR(1) parsing libraries (PLY and SLY).
Although I’m most associated with Python, I’m currently interested in a lot of topics related to functional programming, LLVM, WebAssembly, and other related things. If anything, I’ve been feeling inclined to create my own programming language although time is often scarce so that might just be a fanciful day-dream. In any event, curious to see what develops here.
Great to see you here! I liked your Discovering Python talk. I noticed your tweet that you’re annoyed/surprised people like it more than your other talks but I became your fan after that one so what can I do?
Ha! Annoyed might be a strong word, but I’ve always been (at least in my mind) more technically focused. So, while that talk is fun, I feel like my talks on concurrency and other topics are more meaty ;-).
So nice to see you here! I am a also fascinated by LLVM and WebAssembly. For parsing we tend to use ANTLR and that works pretty well for us. Our two articles with most traffic are the ANTLR Mage Tutorial and parsing in Python. The latter surprised me a bit, I did not expect so many Python people to be interested into parsing. While there is a Python target for ANTLR I guess Python people prefer avoiding the ANTLR tool, which is java based
Hahaha. As they say, as creators once you release your creation to the world, you have no control over it, including whether they will like it or not. But at the same time, that’s the power of external feedback, in that you get sets of different perspective. Honored to see you here.
