I watched that talk when it appeared on the HN front page, and I actually think the whole methodology he is talking about is misguided. I don't find any of the "incremental program understanding" stuff in Visual Studio to be useful at all. I wish it were not there because it only causes problems and distractions.
It's a case where some people are choosing to do something that is a lot harder than a straightforward parse ... but as a user, a straightforward parse is actually what I want.
That said, even if you thought this was the right way to go,
I am not sure that the internals of their code would look anything like the kinds of parsing tools you are talking about, so I am not sure it supports your point in any way.
> And again, I'm not claiming that ALL parsing is hard.
Parsing is easy. The video you link above is harder, but that's not really parsing any more, it's more like "make sense of this text that is sort of like a working program", which is more like an AI problem.
But anyway. It's pretty clear you haven't written many parsers (or any) so I am going to stop arguing. If I were to "win" this argument I wouldn't get anything out of it. I am trying to help by disavowing people of the notion that certain things are harder than they've been indoctrinated to think. If you don't want that help, fine ... just keep doing what you do and the world will keep going onward.
It's a case where some people are choosing to do something that is a lot harder than a straightforward parse ... but as a user, a straightforward parse is actually what I want.
That said, even if you thought this was the right way to go, I am not sure that the internals of their code would look anything like the kinds of parsing tools you are talking about, so I am not sure it supports your point in any way.
> And again, I'm not claiming that ALL parsing is hard.
Parsing is easy. The video you link above is harder, but that's not really parsing any more, it's more like "make sense of this text that is sort of like a working program", which is more like an AI problem.
But anyway. It's pretty clear you haven't written many parsers (or any) so I am going to stop arguing. If I were to "win" this argument I wouldn't get anything out of it. I am trying to help by disavowing people of the notion that certain things are harder than they've been indoctrinated to think. If you don't want that help, fine ... just keep doing what you do and the world will keep going onward.