Time flies like an arrow; Fruit flies like a banana: Parsers for Great Good

When you type print "Hello, world!", how does your computer
know what to do? Humans are able to naturally parse spoken language by
analyzing the role and meaning of each word in context of its
sentence, but we usually take for granted the way computers make sense
of the code we write.

By exploring the way our brains construct grammars to parse sentences,
we can better understand how parsers are used for computering --
whether it be in the way Ruby and other languages are implemented or
in webserver routing -- and recognize when they may be the right tool
to use in our own code.