A Criticism Of The Chomsky Hierarchy

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[GrindLifter]

this is my favourite criticism of the chomsky hierarchy

[tediustimmy]

I don't think I ever went over Chomsky's hierarchy in CS. We started with automata: finite state machines are regular, push down automata are context free, and Turing machines are recursively enumerable. There isn't an automata for context sensitive languages.

[AdamEgret]

My chompsky hierarchy goes lamb > beef > fish > chicken > vegetables. Way better than his hierarchy.

[grencez]

- Recursively Enumerable languages are equivalent to decidable problems. It's like the most useful class of languages to define.
- Recursive decent parsers are great, especially PEGs. No ambiguity or esoteric rule conflicts like LR parsers have.
- Some optimizations are nonlocal; those can't be expressed from within a parser-generator in general.

[diego]

Yes! We need to make sure that we have compilers that can go reproducibly to their grammar definitions so that we can close the attack surface of language vulnerabilities.

[BRUH.]

My favourite youtuber talks about programming language architecture

[matiasbpg]

The chomsky hierarchy is my favorite computer science hierarchy

[Christian-tjjo]

would this be considered a compiler compiler? 🤔

this is my first time ever hearing about this, very interesting

[evandrofilipe]

Oh noo, the video ended That was a such a banger 😢

[vitasomething]

Noam Chomsky - well known for loving hierarchy

[pouf-dknq]

Dude, all your videos are good. And this channel keeps getting better.

[JeremyGluckStuff]

Sounds like a worthwhile dissertation topic.

[somebody-anonymous]

It somehow feels appropriate that you didn't use the purple hat for this one 🤔

[delicious_seabass]

If you actually mean 'compiler generator' and not 'parser generator', then I don't think you can create one that's fast and reliable. There's just too moving parts when you get down to assembly, architecture, and optimization. However, if you instead meant 'parser generator', then that's obviously doable. Though, I'm not sure what the benefit of that is in the long run. Typically, you just have THE language you're creating, not many languages. Also, parsers are pretty easy to write and a hand rolled one is likely going to perform just about as good the generated one. Frankly, that wouldn't even be the bottleneck in the compilation process anyways. File I/O, syntax analysis, optimization and code gen would likely be the bigger challenge. Having said all that, that's just my opinion. I'm happy to be proven wrong.

[programmingsimplicity]

I've come to think of PEG (OhmJS (my favourite)) as a Parser DSL, not as a parser generator. I wonder if I agree with the notion that we need to generate a whole compiler from a grammar. A simpler set of steps might be to create a nano-DSL for each issue in compilation - scanner, parser, semantic gathering, semantic checking, allocation, emission, local optimization, global optimization, etc, etc. ? A lot of (ignored?) early work along these lines was done by Holt, Cordy, et. al (PT Pascal, Concurrent Euclid, Data Descriptors, Orthogonal Code Generator, TXL, etc.) and Fraser/Davidson (RTL - "peepholer", used by gcc)

[jameslynch]

I would argue that it has less to do with manufacturing adherence to roles and policies, and more to do with controlling the means of production of significant symbols. This the symbols used to evaluate the truth claims are subject to a confined construct which the industries intent to extract the maximum human potential.

[garretmh]

Totally caught guard by that ending 😅 really good video, I want to know all about what you would propose instead

[exotic-gem]

Bison does allow explicitly specifying the associativity of operators. Are you dissatisfied with how that works, or simply not aware it is possible ?

[nitsanbh]

Very Interesting!
I would really like to hear more about what a programming language lower in the hierarchy would look like,
And how to generate a compiler to it with a push of a button!

[goofballbiscuits]

This is my favorite Broca's area 🤖