An amusing moment in the XML standard — quite possibly the only snippet of the standard anyone’s likely to call amusing — is the bit early in the introduction that proclaims: It shall be easy to write ...

Let's say I want to implement a parser that just spits out a serialized AST (JSON, XML, whatever's easy). The languages I'd be parsing would be lightweight markup languages like Markdown, RST, etc.

There are few rites of programmer passage as iconic as writing your first parser. You might want to interpret or compile a scripting language, or you might want to accept natural-language-like ...