[Cialug] some truth to that

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Nathan Stien <nathanism at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Jeffrey Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:07 AM, jim kraai <jimgkraai at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/02/page/4/
>>
>> Writing regular expressions isn't _that_ hard, especially if you build
>> them up piece by piece.  Also, a solid understanding of their
>> limitations is essential.
>>
>
> Great comic!  I clicked around and also liked this one:
> http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/05/16/roulette-russe-2/
>
> In my experience, however, *writing* regular expressions is about 100x
> easier than *reading* nontrivial regexes written by others, or even those
> written by oneself 6+ months prior.

What's even worse is the nontrivial variation in regex syntaxes across
languages/libraries.  Especially if you are used to something like
Python or Perl with a very rich/mature/featureful regex library, and
you have to switch to something less so.

-- 
Jeff Ollie