Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom
I wish all technical books were this good. It not only walks you through the necessary steps to create your programming language but also includes a lot of context, memes, and references.
It is also a huge and intimidating book. I do not think I would start reading it if I would not writing YAMD. Even though YAMD is not a programming language, one can name a resulting code - interpreter. And I can say that most of the recent changes in the codebase of YAMD were inspired by this book.
It also enriched my vocabulary and allowed me to search for the correct stuff. The frequency of “Oh, that's what it is” moments was unbelievably high. That is a good thing but also very distracting. My mind was constantly carried away by new ideas requiring further reading or experiments. That significantly contributed to the amount of time I spent reading it.
I want to highlight two documents Robert goes through in the book. They greatly impacted the software engineering in general and are a good read on themselves.
Top-down operator presence by Vaughan R. Pratt
Goto statement considered harmful by Edgar Dijkstra
Go and read them even if you don't plan to read the book.
It will be a good read for you to geekout. It will be a great read if you want to learn what lexer, parser, context-free grammar, AST, bytecode, etc. are.
Original Title: Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom
ISBN: 0990582930 (ISBN13: 9780990582939)
GoodReads: 4.69 / 5
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