[dragonelite]

I thought the same when i did compiler course, but 8 years after that course i wrote tooling to mass refactor a java codebase by creating AST manipulate AST and convert the AST to code again.

[stevage]

Oh, yeah, true. I have done a couple of pretty complex things that involved parsing code or manipulating ASTs and it was probably useful for that.

I attempted to write a parser for Wikitext once in ANTLR which was an interesting nightmare.