Parser generators vs. handwritten parsers: surveying major languages in 2021
I took the compilers class at Stanford and never really understood the algorithms of bottom up parsing, or even really how grammars worked.  I just made the tool work.<p>I then went to work at a private company, and an older guy who had gone to a state school that taught recursive descent (his was the last class to teach it) taught me how to do it.  In a month or so I had learned more about how grammars actually work, what ambiguity is, and so forth, than in my whole class at Stanford.<p>I now teach compilers at a university, and I teach recursive descent.