Eelco was my professor for the course Compiler Construction during my masters in CS. He was everything I always expected a professor in Computer Science to be. Super smart, publishes in the top journals of his field, collaborates with best in class teams in the industry, demands excellence from his students but is fair in his evaluations, clever in his approach to teaching (he wrote a WebDSL based evaluation platform for his course that the entire CS department ended up adopting) and to top it off a kind and funny human being.
Such a shame he passed away, much too soon. Thanks for capturing and sharing some of his insights.
Oh my, he was my favorite professor in uni, and I was not aware he passed away until this comment. I am shocked. Such a loss to the university and the community.
Parsing is only relevant to programs which accept input. Excluding those, it really doesn't matter.
That is to say, parsing is fundamental to virtually all software engineering efforts. The better it is understood, formally employed, and recognized as the first-class citizen it is, the more likely success can be achieved in a given development effort.
Such a shame he passed away, much too soon. Thanks for capturing and sharing some of his insights.