Diary (June 30, 2013)

Online diary of Karl Jones for Sunday June 30, 2013.

Previous: Diary (June 29, 2013) - Next: Diary (August 1, 2013)

Diary

You don't understand things, you just get used to them

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

—John von Neumann, On Mathematics.

TO_DO : Verify quotation

To Regex in Hell

My objection isn't one of functionality it is one of time invested. The problem with RegEx is that by the time you post the cutsey little one liners it appears that you did something more efficiently ("See one line of code!"). And of course no one mentions the half hour (or 3) that they spent with their cheat-sheet and (hopefully) testing every possible permutation of input. And once you get past all that when the maintainer goes to figure out or validate the code they can't just look at it and see that it is right. The have to dissect the expression and essentially retest it all over again to know that it is good. And that will happen even with people who are good with regex. And honestly I suspect that overwhelming majority of people won't know it well. So you take one of the most notorious maintenance nightmares and combine it with recursion which is the other maintenance nightmare and I think to myself what I really need on my project is someone a little less clever. The goal is to write code that bad programmers can maintain without breaking the code base. I know it galls to code to the least common denominator. But hiring excellent talent is hard, and you often and [sic] up with a lot of adequate talent and one really smart guy that is so smart he makes everything take twice as long:)"

• Comment by user Oorang @ Stack Overflow

To Regex in Hell - "It is better to Regex in Hell that Script in Heaven"

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles