[haberman]

Sorry for being a bit pedantic about it. People sometimes write hand-written recursive descent parsers and call them LL parsers, which is sorta true at some level, but misses IMO the key ingredient of automatically-constructed parse tables. I may have been a bit over-eager in reiterating this distinction.

How did you like working on Delphi? I wish I had been studying this stuff that early!

[barrkel]

It was educational, to say the least. I ended up working mostly remotely (H-1B visa, when it came through, I didn't follow through on - I stayed in London with my GF). Apart from learning lots of implementation tricks in compilers (IDE / code completion support especially) and efficient code, as well as picking up experience in things that were more incidental to my immediate interests, like smart linking (turns out, it's very similar to garbage collection) and x64 disassembly for the 64-bit debugger.

More generally I learned how to tackle very complex problems under my own steam, even more so than I had as an autodidact. I have no difficulty drilling down to the next level, all the way to the CPU if necessary, if I have a problem, even if I'm starting out at the level of an interpreted language. I currently work on a web app written in Rails / Coffeescript combo; but I can debug MRI if we get an Ruby issue, and I can and have debugged MySQL when we had crashing issues.