(With apologies to Devo.)

I attended the first of three courses taught by Damian Conway today, Advanced Parsing with Parse::RecDescent. This was, effectively, the Parse::RecDescent tutorial as presented live by Damian. I’ve read the tutorial, and it’s quite good, but it’s hard to beat instruction from the man himself. Not having used the module on too many occasions, the course served to clarify a few concepts of the grammar used by Parse::RecDescent.

Now I see problems in a new light—for better or worse. This evening, I joined my boss to debug a problem we’ve been seeing in our compute cluster. I joked that I could just whip up a grammar to track down the problem for us. I must resist my usual urge to apply my new, shiny tool to all problems. I mean, it’s bad enough I use the Perl hammer for everything, right?

Today’s course left me with nostalgia for the compilers course I took in college. As my partner for that long ago class reminded me, it was filled with “late nights and Mountain Dew.” Ah, good times.