Dinner with Al Aho was one of the highlights of when I visited Columbia a while ago.  He&#x27;s simply an awesome person.  And he&#x27;s done some fantastic work - Aho-Corasick is a great algorithm.  Alas, the Dragon Book was one of the low points of my undergraduate education, though I had a great teacher who pulled out a terrifically fun class despite the book.  (Thanks, +Wilson Hsieh.)<p>In fairness, though -- or more an admission of how wrong we can be about things like this -- I subscribed to the &quot;parsing is boring and solved&quot; belief until Bryan Ford&#x27;s Packrat Parsing work made me realize that it had just gotten stuck at a traffic light for a few decades.