[junek]

My hot take is that the allure of parser-generators is mostly academic. If you're designing a language it's good practice to write out a formal grammar for it, and then it feels like it should be possible to just feed that grammar to a program and have it spit out a fully functional parser.

In practice, parser generators are always at least a little disappointing, but that nagging feeling that it _should_ work remains.

Edit: also the other sense of academic, if you have to teach students how to do parsing, and need to teach formal grammar, then getting two birds with one stone is very appealing.

[zelphirkalt]

It is not academic. It is very practical to actually have a grammar and thus the possibility to use any language that has a perser generator. It is very annoying to have a great format, but no parser and no official grammar for the format available and being stuck with whatever tooling exists, because you would have to come up with a completely new grammar to implement a parser.

[junek]

> It is very practical to actually have a grammar

I fully agree that you need to have a grammar for your language.

> and thus the possibility to use any language that has a perser generator.

See, this is where it falls down in my experience. You can't just feed "the grammar" straight into each generator, and you need to account for the quirks of each generator anyway. So the practical, idk, "reusability"... is much lower than it seems like it should be.

If you could actually just write your grammar once and feed it to any parser generator and have it actually work then that would be cool. I just don't think it works out that way in practice.