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A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

jeremykun.com

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Re: A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

#11

Post by theoh »

foldr wrote: post #7
theoh wrote: post #3

Am I the only person who looks at Jeremy Kun's output and thinks "Nope, this guy is not actually a gifted communicator dedicated to sharing knowledge, he's just a postdoc on an annoyingly self-aggrandizing narcissism trip"?

He's not a postdoc, though?

Presumably you understand what I'm saying ("he's 'just a vain postdoc on an ego trip'"). Of course I know what his professional status is, it's the most prominent information on his website.

It's a shame that rather than actually considering the very evident pathology here (i.e. the production of mediocre vanity blog content that serves primarily to improve the author's profile) everyone is either downvoting or nitpicking.

Re: A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

#12

Post by imgabe »

theoh wrote: post #11
foldr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not a postdoc, though?

Presumably you understand what I'm saying ("he's 'just a vain postdoc on an ego trip'"). Of course I know what his professional status is, it's the most prominent information on his website. It's a shame that rather than actually considering the very evident pathology here (i.e. the production of mediocre vanity blog content that serves primarily to improve the author's profile) everyone is either downvoting or nitpi…

You might have better luck if you were to expound upon the ways in which you found the content to be mediocre and how it might be improved rather than personally attacking the author for what you perceive his motives to be.

Re: A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

#13

Post by pfortuny »

theoh wrote: post #11
foldr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not a postdoc, though?

Presumably you understand what I'm saying ("he's 'just a vain postdoc on an ego trip'"). Of course I know what his professional status is, it's the most prominent information on his website. It's a shame that rather than actually considering the very evident pathology here (i.e. the production of mediocre vanity blog content that serves primarily to improve the author's profile) everyone is either downvoting or nitpi…

OTOH he might just be writing for the pleasure of it and getting self-feedback from it (the more you explain something the better you understand it).

Re: A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

#15

Post by mlevental »

theoh wrote: post #3

Am I the only person who looks at Jeremy Kun's output and thinks "Nope, this guy is not actually a gifted communicator dedicated to sharing knowledge, he's just a postdoc on an annoyingly self-aggrandizing narcissism trip"?

people are downvoting you because that's one the saltiest opinions I've ever seen on hn. the guy is a narcissist because he writes a blog and other people post it? how does make that sense in your head? or do you think that the people that post links to his blog are shills? not to mention his pedagogy is excellent - these blog posts (which are not his primers) are meant to be introductory and cursory.

Re: A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

#16

Post by acprog42 »

OskarS wrote: post #6

> Our hero, a mathematician, is writing notes in LaTeX and needs to convert it to a format that her blog platform accepts. She’s used to using dollar sign delimiters for math mode, but her blog requires \( \) and \[ \]. Unless our hero mathematician is writing, like, several blog posts a day, using tools like parser generators and writing your grammar in BNF and the like is WAY overkill. Just use search/replace and m…

But killing an ant with a nuclear bomb is moar funnier! Don't stop the fun!

Re: A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

#18

Post by foldr »

theoh wrote: post #11
foldr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not a postdoc, though?

Presumably you understand what I'm saying ("he's 'just a vain postdoc on an ego trip'"). Of course I know what his professional status is, it's the most prominent information on his website. It's a shame that rather than actually considering the very evident pathology here (i.e. the production of mediocre vanity blog content that serves primarily to improve the author's profile) everyone is either downvoting or nitpi…

I mean, if you know what his professional status is, why say that he's a postdoc when he isn't?

Re: A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

#19

Post by vorg »

RiversHaveWings wrote: post #2

My go-to library for parsing in Python is https://github.com/pyparsing/pyparsing , a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar -based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parser_combinator library. I generally find it much easier to get my head around parser combinators than parser generators.

As the author says:

> because the parser generator knows about all patterns you want to match in advance, it will match longer terminals before shorter—more ambiguous—terminals

If you don't mind manually ordering your choices in your alt operators, then PEG and parser combinators are OK.

Oh, and you often need to restructure your grammar to avoid left recursion.

Re: A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

#20

Post by algorithmsRcool »

theoh wrote: post #5
pmyteh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see that him being "just" a postdoc has very much to do with anything, especially when covering stuff like this which is foundational rather than cutting-edge.

The "just" was supposed to apply to the whole self-aggrandizing trip. My point is that there are a lot of people with math PhDs, but Kun is in a small unenviable minority that is driven to engage in self-promotion via all these blog post "primers", which of very dubious pedagogical quality.

I enjoy his content and I have found some of his explanations novel and enlightening.

I don't know why him spending untold hours producing detailed content is a bad thing. Even if it is for self-promotion.

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