Timeline for What is meant by "Now you have two problems"?
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| May 23, 2017 at 12:40 | history | edited | CommunityBot | replaced http://stackoverflow.com/ with https://stackoverflow.com/ | |
| Jan 17, 2014 at 2:40 | comment | added | smonff | @Ampt, I don't think regexes are much more complicated than any bad written programming language. For example, a Perl regex written with best practices standards is pretty readable. The argument about pain to parse HTML with regexes is true because nobody will recommend to anybody to try to parse (X)HTML with it. | |
| Jan 11, 2014 at 10:03 | comment | added | Konrad Rudolph | Maybe we do but my definition is actionable: I take simple to mean easy to comprehend, easy to maintain, low number of bugs hidden etc. Of course a complex regex will at first glance not look very comprehensible. But the same is true for an equivalent non-regex piece of code. I’ve never said that regex are simple. I’m saying they’re simpler – I’m comparing. That’s important. | |
| Jan 11, 2014 at 4:54 | comment | added | Ampt | @KonradRudolph I think we have a fundamental disagreement about the definition of the word simple then. I'll give you that regex can be more efficient or even more powerful but I don't think that simple is the word that comes to anyone's mind when you think of regex. | |
| Jan 10, 2014 at 17:29 | comment | added | Konrad Rudolph | That’s not a proper argument. Yes, sure regex are complex. But so are other programming languages. Regex is considerably less complex than most other languages, and the tools that exist for regex are dwarfed by development tools for other languages (FWIW I work extensively with regex and I’ve never used such tools …). It’s a simple truth that even complex regex are simpler than equivalent non-regex parsing code. | |
| Jan 10, 2014 at 16:30 | comment | added | Ampt | @KonradRudolph I think the fact that there are numerous regex generation and validation tools goes to show that regex is a complicated mechanism. It's not human readable (by design) and can cause a complete change in flow for someone modifying or writing a piece of code which uses regex. As to the second part, I think it's clear in it's implication from the vast grouping of knowledge on P.SE and by the saying "Debugging code is twice as hard as writing it, so if you write the most clever code you can, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it" | |
| Jan 10, 2014 at 10:21 | comment | added | Konrad Rudolph | Neither of the claims in your first sentence are true. Regex is not particularly complicated, and like no other tool do you need to know it perfectly in order to solve problems with it. That’s just FUD. Your second paragraph is plain ridiculous: of course you can make the argument. But it’s not a good one. | |
| Jan 9, 2014 at 18:10 | history | answered | Ampt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |