| Written by Nikos Vaggalis |
| Tuesday, 16 July 2019 |
Finland's educational system is famous for three reasons: its pedagogical outlook, its technological excellence and its openness to the world.
Sticking to the latter, University of Helsinki's "Full Stack Open 2019" which familiarizes students with the basics of modern web application development, initialy taken in Finish only, has been made available in English too, under the permissive Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license:
“We wanted to make the course available in English as a way to offer Finnish university education for free to an international audience”
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At last, a guide that makes creating a language with its associated
baggage of lexers, parsers and compilers, accessible to mere mortals,
rather to a group of a few hardcore eclectics as it stood until now.
The first thing that catches the eye, is the subtitle:
The unix philosophy applied to language design, for GPLs and DSLs"
What is meant by "unix philosophy" ?. It's taking simple, high quality components and combining them together in smart ways to obtain a complex result; the exact approach the book adopts.
I'm getting ahead here, but a first sample of this philosophy becomes apparent at the beginnings of Chapter 5 where the Parser treats and calls the Lexer like unix's pipes as in lexer|parser. Until the end of the book, this pipeline is going to become larger, like a chain, due to the amount of components that end up interacting together.
The book opens by putting things into perspective in Chapter 1: Motivation: why do you want to build lan…
The first thing that catches the eye, is the subtitle:
The unix philosophy applied to language design, for GPLs and DSLs"
What is meant by "unix philosophy" ?. It's taking simple, high quality components and combining them together in smart ways to obtain a complex result; the exact approach the book adopts.
I'm getting ahead here, but a first sample of this philosophy becomes apparent at the beginnings of Chapter 5 where the Parser treats and calls the Lexer like unix's pipes as in lexer|parser. Until the end of the book, this pipeline is going to become larger, like a chain, due to the amount of components that end up interacting together.
The book opens by putting things into perspective in Chapter 1: Motivation: why do you want to build lan…
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