There is contention between the "European school" of language design, who prefer LL-based grammars, and the "US-school", who predominantly prefer LR-based grammars. This is largely due to teaching traditions and the detailed description of specific methods and tools in certain text books; another influence may be Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, whose research has described a number of ways of optimising LL(1) languages and compilers.

LL parser article in wikipedia.