Codekana blog » Blog Archive » On the Speed of Light, Innovation, and the Future of Parsing: "What we now have are just the first babblings of software – clumsy languages, systems and architectures, poor tools, and primitive theories, which are guaranteed to have an expiry date in the not-very-distant future. It’s sure we won’t be using the current theories and processes in a matter of a few decades.
I recently read an otherwise educated developer remark: “parsing is basically a solved problem”. He probably knew about parsing, maybe even in some depth: recursive descent, LR parsing, lex and yacc and their multiple descendants… But he must have been unable to see beyond that. It’s the only explanation for his affirmation, because I think nothing is further from the truth.
These are the very early days of computing. We have just started exploring the shore of a new continent, and it’s shocking, because many are already proclaiming that it’s over. But the good news is that there is plenty of unconquered territory, most of the settlers have their eyes covered, and they’re not even attempting to grab any of it."
