Denis Defreyne wants to give this talk

Let’s write a parser!

How do you communicate with a computer?

A vast amount of human-computer communication happens through structured data. There’s markup languages like Markdown and HTML, data interchange formats like JSON and XML, and programming languages like Ruby and JavaScript.

As a series of characters, data in such formats and languages mean nothing to a computer. To give the data meaning, a program called a parser needs to interpret the data and convert it into a meaningful structure.

Writing a parser is fun, and it is a good skill to have. This talk will explain how it works.