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+ gitQL, a Git query language tool written in Go |
• Sponsor shoutout to Backtrace and StackImpact |
• Promotion of show's social media handles (Twitter and GitHub) for guest inquiries or questions |
**Erik St. Martin:** Alright everybody, we are back for another episode of GoTime. This is episode \#28. It is our last episode before a two-week break for the holidays. Our show today is sponsored by Backtrace and StackImpact. |
Today on the show we have myself, Erik St. Martin, Brian Ketelsen is finally back from traveling, so he is also on the show... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Wait, I'm back? Hello...? |
**Erik St. Martin:** You're back! |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I'm back? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Well, you can leave again if you want... I mean, we're getting used to this whole Brian being gone thing. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Is this live? Wait a minute... \[laughter\] |
**Carlisia Thompson:** You forgot everything, Brian. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[laughs\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** And we also have Carlisia Pinto on the call, as well. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Hi, everybody. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Today's special guest is Thorsten Ball, who many of you may have seen a recent book that came out by him, "Writing An Interpreter in Go." |
**Thorsten Ball:** Hello there! |
**Erik St. Martin:** So do you wanna give everybody maybe a little bit of a background on who you are and the stuff you work on? |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah, of course. As I said - or you said - my name is Thorsten Ball. I'm a software developer from Germany and at daytime I develop with the Web stack, I work on web applications in the backend and the frontend at a startup, and at night-time or in the early mornings, because I'm a morning person, I ... |
I've written a book about it on how to build your own programming language and self-published it four weeks ago. I'm really excited about all of this, I'm excited about the book, I'm excited about programming languages and I'm excited about understanding how they work and how to implement them yourself. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So is this something you do as part of your career? Is this a passion project? |
**Thorsten Ball:** No, no... I wish I could do this as part of my career, but as of today nobody tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I want you to invent a programming language." I'm still hoping, fingers crossed... Yeah, this is purely a passion project. I have this weird thing where I discover a black box in program... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So this is the callout - if anybody needs a programming language written, contact Thorsten. |
**Thorsten Ball:** \[laughs\] Shoot me an email, right. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I have to say, I got early access to the book and did some read-throughs on it, and it is an amazing book. If you haven't yet picked up a copy, it's well worth the read. I learned a million things and I've only made it through maybe four chapters... It's really good. |
**Thorsten Ball:** \[04:03\] Thank you. |
**Erik St. Martin:** We'll link to it in the show notes. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, it's as deep of a dive as I can possibly handle and I loved it. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Thank you very much. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** It's a good read. |
**Erik St. Martin:** For anybody listening live, it's at interpreterbook.com. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Right. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's actually really interesting... The language that's in it - is this a language you kind of created on the spot, or is this like a reference language that people use for creating mock interpreters and compilers? Where did the language come from? |
**Thorsten Ball:** The language is actually made up. It's called Monkey, and I made it up on the spot, basically. The idea for the language - if you go to interpreterbook.com you can see what it looks like, and it looks like a cross between C and JavaScript and Rust; that's the syntax. And it behave like a Lisp or, let... |
So that's the first reason, because it's easy to do. The other reason why it looks the way it looks, with the curly braces and so on, is because before I started thinking about writing the book I was frustrated by tutorials that only show how to implement a programming language that looks super easy, or it looks like a... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So you just kind of half-answered one of the questions I was gonna ask... What's the value of learning about compilers and interpreters? Where does that take you as a programmer, and then what do you gain from coming away from this knowing more? Where's the take-home benefit? |
**Thorsten Ball:** To be completely honest, for me the biggest takeaway would be that it's super fun. As I said, I work with web applications all day, and if you develop locally, you have to spin up your server, your database, you have to make external requests and so on and so forth. If you develop a programming langu... |
\[08:13\] The other thing is, if you learn how to implement your own programming language, you learn how other languages work, right? And you start to understand why interpreters are the way they are, and you start to understand how Brendan Eich could implement JavaScript in ten days, or something like this. I think th... |
I'm a big fan of understanding the abstractions you work with, so if I'm building a web page, I think you should know how HTTP works; maybe not in the beginning, but to get the most out of it, you should know one level of abstraction beneath the one you're working on - that's always the phrase I use. I don't know who s... |
I think understanding the level beneath the one you're working on gives you a lot more leverage further up, and it gives you a lot more power further up, because you suddenly understand better how the pieces fit together. That's why I think if you know how compilers work and interpreters work, you can use them to a gre... |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's interesting, because many of the things that we use are meant to be abstractions, and so many of them actually turn out to be leaky abstractions, where when you get into these cases where something doesn't work the way you expect it to, it's typically when it becomes a leaky abstraction, and n... |
I learned a lot more about software by learning about hardware, too. When you start to understand a Crystal and the clock ticks and things like that, and that when you're sleeping for some amount of time, it's actually some sub-division of clock ticks, and it's not exactly that amount of time. You can only get a close ... |
**Thorsten Ball:** I totally agree. Before the show started we had a little chat in the chatroom about IDEs, and I'm hesitant about IDEs. I use Vim, I'm a big fan of it... The things is, with IDEs - my problem with them is you're on such a high level in the abstraction pyramid... You're up there in your IDE and you pre... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[12:04\] Yeah, that part I didn't really understand, because I don't see the difference between pressing the button on an IDE and pressing a key or a combination of keys on a Vim or Emacs. I don't know... I'm not sure what you meant. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Okay, what I meant is it's not Vim or IntelliJ themselves, but if you use Vim - and you're probably gonna use Git on the command line, and you're gonna use a curl on the command line, and so on. If you know those tools and how to use the tools themselves, you probably understand them better than a Gi... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yes, it makes sense, but I'm not sure if it's more like memorizing the commands versus not memorizing the commands, because you have the visual right there... I don't know, maybe you can still understand the concepts without using the commands. |
**Thorsten Ball:** This is like a pet topic of mine... There's this book (or essay) by Neal Stephenson, and it's called In the Beginning was the Command Line. He talks about his computing history; he started with the Mac and then he went to Windows, and PC, and BIOS, and then (I think the book is 15 years old now) he s... |
I don't know, maybe my argument is the same one - if you can see what you're working with, if you can see more lower levels, you can use them to your advantage. I have the feeling that some software IDEs have to - they make things simpler, but they hide complexity. And the question is, if you hide complexity, how much ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I think I see your point, because for example with Git I don't use any visual graphical interface because it slows me down a lot. The reason is with the command line I can do things a lot faster, and because I can do things a lot faster, I can do more things more quickly, so I get to actually lea... |
**Thorsten Ball:** That's true. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** By learning more I think I get a greater understanding of what the thing is, so I think there is that aspect of what you're saying. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think the line comes between usage and implementation. If you use something that's GDB or Git tied into your IDE, you understand the principles from a usage standpoint, but not necessarily the implementation details. So when things go wrong, the implementation details are usually what matter in t... |
\[16:09\] For most of us there's not a lot of value in that, but there can be a lot of value in understanding the operating system at least at like a surface level, and command line and things like that. It's just kind of a constant trade, I guess. |
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