A Brutal Look at Balanced Parentheses, Computing Machines, and Pushdown Automata
4 comments
·November 5, 2025macintux
One of the few lessons I distinctly remember from college was finite automata in my PL class. I really enjoyed exploring the concepts and writing a grep tool; we were supposed to write either a NFA or DFA processing application, but I decided to write both.
20 years later I got to apply some of the same ideas to a language processing application, and it was such a pleasure to actually use something conceptual like that. Made me briefly regret landing in more hybrid infrastructure/automation roles instead of pure software development.
Somewhere I may still have my copy of Preperata and Yeh that my professor recommended at the time for further reading. Like most of my books, it was never actually read, just sat around for years.
kazinator
[delayed]
senorqa
The pictures of Brutalist architecture are awesome!
we’ll ask, “What’s the simplest possible computing machine that can recognize balanced parentheses?”
A counter. That's the difference between theory and practice. Because in practice, everything is finite.