Surely you have written a sort when you were in college - even if that was 40 years ago :) I see this type of a stuff as huge advantage to older developers, not disadvantage - I am older developer (50+) and I have actual had foundational CS classes in school back in the day which I am not sure how many younger developers get these days...
Of course I have. I worked in embedded systems at the start, but write one from scratch nope.
I do agree with you about the lack of traditional CS. Whenever I am parsing anything, I first reach for a FSM, and none of all the bullshit string copy, string trim, strim unpad, string unpad in the middle. I also know enough about modern lock free algorithms to know that some 10 minute scribble and a bunch of buzzwords does not scratch the surface.
In general, scanning/lexing uses FSMs, parsing is done with push down automata (PDAs) (you need a stack to parse, you don’t really need a stack to scan).
You are making an example of my point? When parsing something like a comma separated list I generally don't get carried away with anything more with a switch/case state machine.
Even if it has commas in quotes, it's a comma seen in the state 'collecting text'. There is no need for anything more complicated than an FSM. Maybe there is in leetcode. One character of pushback is not a 'stack' unless you are answering a Google interviewer.
In computer science, parsing is distinguished from scanning via nesting. Or you can think of it as languages that you can recognize with FSMs (scanning) like regular expressions, and languages you can recognize with PDAs (parsing) like CFGs.
This would never come up in a Google interview and really only comes up in CS 101 (or whatever your program's first CS theory course is) when you study computational models , languages and automata for the first time. Anyone who doesn't go on to do compilers really doesn't care much about the distinction.
