A Talk Near the Future of Python (a.k.a., Dave live-codes a WebAssembly Interpreter)

There was a youtube video a few years back that showed a guy livecoding...I think an ECMA interpreter, or maybe a WASM interpreter from scratch using some very easy to follow code. I can't remember what it was or the video, but it was gobsmacking. So instead here's another story. I once worked with an old Perl greybeard, he had written some kind of code that could parse an almost impossible large set of string formats that a large collection of automated systems produced except they all had some sort of non-standard/non-guaranteed formatting or semantics. Little bits and pieces (some semi-atomic bits) of them were semi-reliable, but the aggregate strings were just a huge mess, things came in all kinds of orders, had unreliable separators (if any) some things came in backwards, some forwards, and so on. You might imagine them to be things like IP addresses that sometimes had system names attached, sometimes locations, sometimes, no address, sometimes the address was separated by dots or commas, sometimes, pieces of equipment were listed. All legacy of decades of people slowly accruing bits and pieces of the larger system and naming things for local convenience rather for global understanding. As the systems rolled up these strings would sometimes get concatenated in different ways and in different orders. His code looked like total gibberish, a library of a bunch of code that sort of looked like Perl but also sort of looked like a custom rule language, it had something like 12