I love this! Amazing work!
Thanks!
Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#22[flagged]
This kid has plenty of time to dive into other languages. C is a great choice.
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#23Nicely done. You're a freshman, picked up C over the summer, and have already built an interpreter for a language that you haven't officially been taught yet, and have a blog with a couple dozen posts. I'll be honest, people with achievements like yours make me feel pretty worthless.
Ya, but would you rather spend the summer enjoying summer or writing C
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#24Ambitious! What were some of the educational resources you used or that inspired you before and throughout the project? Textbooks, tutorials etc..?
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#25Ambitious! What were some of the educational resources you used or that inspired you before and throughout the project? Textbooks, tutorials etc..?
Robert Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters (https://craftinginterpreters.com/) is an awesome resource :D
Though I didn't implement his language exactly, a lot of what he talks about carries over anywhere. It especially helped me figure out how to handle the memory management and scoping.
Vincent Jacques' DrawGrammar (https://jacquev6.github.io/DrawGrammar/) was also super helpful. Getting to see the syntax definition visually made writing it so much easier :).
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#26Nicely done. You're a freshman, picked up C over the summer, and have already built an interpreter for a language that you haven't officially been taught yet, and have a blog with a couple dozen posts. I'll be honest, people with achievements like yours make me feel pretty worthless.
Ya, but would you rather spend the summer enjoying summer or writing C
It depends. When I was young I could spend hours coding and it felt amazing and like a great use of my time. Now in my 30s? No way, writing detailed code and spending all my time in front of the screen feels like I’m throwing away my life. All that minutia, whether useful or useless, is repulsive.
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya, but would you rather spend the summer enjoying summer or writing C
It depends. When I was young I could spend hours coding and it felt amazing and like a great use of my time. Now in my 30s? No way, writing detailed code and spending all my time in front of the screen feels like I’m throwing away my life. All that minutia, whether useful or useless, is repulsive.
That's pretty much how I feel as well. In my 30s now, but unemployed and working a bit day to day on a project while sending out the odd job application in an abysmal market (in the same city as the author), but it's a gradual process and only after enjoying the sunny days as much as possible, socializing, fitness etc..
It's not that there's no time for coding in a hobbyist manner, but I'm careful about moderating the amount of time I allocate to it.
That said, I wasn't at even remotely the same level of execution ability as the author, and are probably still not, but I was starting to work with freelance clients in PHP and Angular.js, building some small technical experiments end to end, and relentlessly trying to get better at technical stuff. I could definitely still do that, just not at the expense of other things.
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#28This is seriously impressive. I’m also just about to enter college for software engineering and projects like this make me concerned about how I’m even gonna compete with such skilled peers.
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#29Well done, I had a degree and 5 years professional experience under my belt before doing that.
Make sure you foster that curiosity continuously until the day you die, because it'll serve you really well
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#30Since you're going into your freshman year I'll offer my college advice as a current senior. The moment that you feel a class will be covering something you already know, reach out to your advisor and the professor. I personally wasted far too much time in intro classes that could've been easily bypassed. While easy A's are great for the GPA, it's better to spend your time and money actually learning.