In my last adventure, I complained mightily about how a tiny bug in tree-sitter-scss was all that stood between me and my next heroic work accomplishment. Although I didn't mention it at the time, I had little faith that my submitted issue would be addressed anytime soon, since when looking at the tree-sitter grammar repository I could see that the SCSS parser had last been updated in early April of 2024 and had been idle for eight months.

I took matters into my own hands.

Update: Contrary to my whining down below, I spent the weekend playing with tree-sitter, found the bug, and have submitted a PR.

When you've got twenty years of developer experience, there is one source of frustration at work that can be greater than any other: when you can see the promised land but you know you can't get there and, worst of all, the wall between you and there is barely ankle high.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert on parsers and scanners. I've written a few DSLs in my time and always leaned on something commonly available, usually either s-expressions, a readily available configuration language like YAML or TOML, or just a cut-down version of the host language with specificity for my DSL needs.

So let's talk about Shatterfly.