davedolan.com

Mr Parr,
You never met me, but I’m very well acquainted with you and your work. You’ve produced a set of good tools, and I’ll have to admit that I’ve been inspired by your endeavors. If it weren’t for you and ANTLR, I’d not know what a parser is. I’d never have spent all the time frustrating myself trying to figure out how to write a compiler, or even an interpreter. Overall I can’t blame you for firing my imagination enough to make me want to pursue the now very real possibility of implementing my own language based solutions, but I do blame you for one thing: your famous quote of quotes:

“Why spend 5 days writing by hand what you can spend 5 years of your life automating?”

Yeah that’s right. It’s all your fault. I was so profoundly wounded by that sentiment that it drove me up the wall. It carried over into everything I’ve been working on. I’ve somehow had it in my head that I should never write a line of code by hand again, other than to generate other code, or even code to generate code generators. While this has the potential to be wildly productive… oh say… five years from now, it’s making me look silly to everyone else who’s ripping out RADD apps left and right in front of me! I refuse to wire up a UserControl manually because I just KNOW that I can write a tool to generate it for me, and I absolutely abhor the concept of designing a web page layout IN THE ACTUAL PAGE because surely there is a way for me to abstract it to meta data that will allow me to rattle off three lines of script that will generate a page that will handle any and every single type of input that will ever be devised by man and his future ilk.

I guess the part that I’ve been missing, and, really I have no excuse for it, you’ve provided all the wisdom that I should have needed right there after the ‘when you can spend’, is that part about the ‘five years of your life.’ I mean, I’ve read it enough, and said it enough, and it’s right there in ones and zeros. I should have figured out what that meant by now. But no. Sadly, I’m still on the quest to automate everything, and Terence, it’s all your fault! You corruptor of simple minds!

Sincerely,
Dave

Phew! Finally. I got that out of my system.