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Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”

journal.stuffwithstuff.com

21–30 of 76 posts

Re: Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”

#22

> Writing this all out makes me sound like a crazy person. What the hell am I doing with my life? Or, more importantly, what could I have been doing instead of doing all that? That's why your book is so good! Singular focus on one subject like this either causes insanity or genius. Examples: redis, Linux, sqlite, dwarf fortress, etc. I (believe, not sure) all were started by a single person who was insane by any meas…

CMIIW, but I believe most of those projects were started with a relatively small (and reasonable) scope.

Re: Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”

#25
post #19

This book has been a big help to me - thanks! > I liked the hand-drawn look. It furthered my meta-goal of making the material more approachable, more human. But I wanted to up the quality. I wanted them to be more intricate and contain more information. I wanted the drawings to be more detailed. Less margin doodles and more, well, illustrations. Maybe even some lowercase letters. This is one of the most unusual aspec…

I poured a lot of effort into creating something similar for my book, but could never get it quite right. So, I backed away to diagrams in Inkscape using squares and curves. The result has been well received, but I've always slightly regretted not being able to create something as elegant as what Crafting Interpreters has been able to achieve.

At some stage in the future, I'll try again I'm sure!

Re: Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”

#26
post #11

Awesome, thanks muchly, Bob! Reading and learning from "Crafting Interpreters" inspired four of my own fun projects (the first three on github.com/benhoyt): littlelang, my first little language interpreter, in Go; loxlox, a Lox interpreter written in Bob's Lox language; goawk, a full AWK interpreter written in Go; and my current unreleased project, a Turbo Pascal to Go converter with the goal of transpiling the recon…

I don't like to play favorites since there are a number of Lox implementations... but loxlox is definitely my favorite. :)

Re: Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”

#27
post #19

This book has been a big help to me - thanks! > I liked the hand-drawn look. It furthered my meta-goal of making the material more approachable, more human. But I wanted to up the quality. I wanted them to be more intricate and contain more information. I wanted the drawings to be more detailed. Less margin doodles and more, well, illustrations. Maybe even some lowercase letters. This is one of the most unusual aspec…

I hand-drew the illustrations for my first book too, and I talk a little about the thought behind that here:

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/04/22/zero-to-95688-h...

Re: Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”

#28

This is amazing! I remember when you started this, and have been somewhat following along since then. This is a masterpiece. Is there any way to pay you for this book? :-)

Not yet, no. But thank you, very much.

Once the print and eBook editions are ready, buying one of those will be the best way to say thanks. But, honestly, right now my family and I are in so much better shape than a lot of people. I'm able to work from home in a well-paid field. We're all safe and healthy.

So if you feel like doing something kind for someone, instead of throwing some cash my way, consider donating to a food bank or other local charity that can help people financially impacted by COVID-19.

Re: Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”

#30
How does this work? Spending 4 years, full time from what it seems, on a book with a (let's face it) niche audience. While having (again, it seems from the post) a family with children, living in a first world country, flying regularly (I'm using this as a shortcut for 'getting out of the house for things more expensive than a hike in the woods'). So that's an opportunity cost of 200k for a book that would a runaway success if it made... 50k over its lifetime? Is there a backstory I'm missing here - is the author an already well-known internet celebrity living off Patreon or something like that (I couldn't find anything on the blog that indicates that)
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