Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aplorbust 3039 days ago
"Why Developers Should Be Force-Fed State Machines"

https://shopifyengineering.myshopify.com/blogs/engineering/1...

I always thought all computer science students had to take a compilers course, or some course on theory of computation that required some level of competency in lexing/scanning/tokenizing and parsing. This blog post appears to be directed at "web application developers" who lack "awareness about state machines".
2 comments
mikekchar 3039 days ago
Quite a lot of software developers were never CS students. In fact in some industries engineers are very much desired as programmers. In others, math and physics majors are desirable. And even when we exhaust all of those, I don't think there is any need to look down our noses at those who took an apprenticeship style approach to the industry. In fact, in my career I have met many CS graduates who dismissed grammars and automata as irrelevant and insisted on writing that parser for a context sensitive language using regular expressions and about 400 global variables (and they still can't understand why it doesn't always work). Besides some of us "web application developers" actually have CS degrees and have worked in half a dozen other industries besides "web application development". Programming is programming and a programmer is a programmer. There's a lot to learn and you have to stay humble your whole career. Not everybody manages it easily.
link
noir_lord 3039 days ago
Very nicely put.

I've worked with lots of programmers over the years and a CS degree has been a very poor indicator of their ability to program in the large.

link
aplorbust 3038 days ago
The ECMAScript standard actually has a section on "Context- Free Grammars". In that section and subsequent sections there is discussion of tokens, terminals, nonterminals and productions. If a web application developer using Javascript read these sections of the language specification and became curious enough to do a little outside research on the terminology, then perhaps it is forseeable she might encounter the notion of a "state machine".
link