I definitely don't think there's anything wrong with using them, but my experience has been more pleasurable without in general. I'm also not entirely sure you can ever really understand the benefits of using a CC, or the reasons they impose the limitations they do, if you've never even attempted to go without one. And I think that when you're first learning about parsing you'll probably be learning more at a faster pace doing it yourself than trying to learn your way around the rather frustrating tooling built around CCs.
I guess if I'm trying to be more clear I'm glad to see this perspective expressed, since it's a relatively rare one to see expressed authoritatively. There are a few topics in parsing that I don't think get enough discussion.
Like, my pet peeve is people thinking a naive implementation of the packrat parser is guaranteed to perform better than a plain recursive descent parser. In reality you might just be trading explosive memory growth for algorithmic steps. In a lot of cases that's actually slower.
I guess if I'm trying to be more clear I'm glad to see this perspective expressed, since it's a relatively rare one to see expressed authoritatively. There are a few topics in parsing that I don't think get enough discussion.
Like, my pet peeve is people thinking a naive implementation of the packrat parser is guaranteed to perform better than a plain recursive descent parser. In reality you might just be trading explosive memory growth for algorithmic steps. In a lot of cases that's actually slower.