This article sums it up perfectly. I was interested in building a compiler long before going to college and this was the most accessible body of work.
Building a recursive descent parser from scratch was an eye opener to 17yo me on how a seemingly very complex problem that I had no idea how to approach can be made simple by breaking it down into the right primitives.
Building a recursive descent parser from scratch was an eye opener to 17yo me on how a seemingly very complex problem that I had no idea how to approach can be made simple by breaking it down into the right primitives.