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Comment by NKCSS | Hacker News Reader

GIT is just the new Regex. Everybody uses it, most have no clue how it works and just copy/pasts stuff from other places/repeats the same little trick

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No, that’s terrifyingly untrue.

Git is more like… the new car. It’s complicated and most people have no idea how it works, but they know how to steer very simply and can drive it with a bit of training. Experienced people however, who know how cars work, can do really cool things with them and have no problem repairing them on their own.

Still, cars are useful. A bike would be better of course.

I like it! I'll do you one further. Git is more like... someone ripped out all the controls from your car and installed a Boeing 787 dashboard. You'd probably figure out how to start it and make it go forward, left and right, but you'd miss out on a lot of functionality and likely destroy something while playing with unknown buttons.

I find regex easier to write than to read.

I never copy them from stackoverflow because I'm worried it does some weird magic that I don't want. Instead I build them against one or more examples.

Totally agree! But oddly enough, I have this problem with all code/languages… I always write code much more easily than I read it. I can write fairly complex applications just by following the logic of what the application must do in my brain (but with ZERO cleverness). But give me the source code of even the simplest Unix command and I’ll struggle to understand the purpose of every #define, the variable naming scheme, etc., etc. I’m sure this is telling me something interesting about how my brain works but I’m not sure what!

> I’m sure this is telling me something interesting about how my brain works

See my sibling comment. Joel says you are just normal.

> I find regex easier to write than to read.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Joel, 22 years ago:

There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

I say that because there's a meme that nobody writes regex and that everyone copy-paste it from stackoverflow.

And the corollary: since code is harder to read than write, steer clear of writing clever code where simple code would suffice, as the clever code will be much harder to read.

A second argument is that debugging is harder than writing.

s/writing/reading

AKA Kernighan's Law: https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/kernighan/

Joel is 100% spot on. This is exactly why I don’t think things like Copilot will catch on. Making programming involve less writing code and more reading code actually makes the job more difficult.

I can highly recommend regexr.com for testing and developing regex patterns; paste a representative sample in the "Text" area and it'll show you how things match (and usually, crucially, don't match) as you change the regex pattern.

I'm not associated with them, and I understand you don't seem to have any real issues with regex, but thought this would be a good place to mention a useful tool.

Nice! I’ve been writing (and reading) regexes for over 20 years now. I can usually ‘read’ them on sight, but I’ve been wanting this tool for when it all goes wrong.

Which of course always happens at least once or twice in any new dataset/usage.

I've used that and regexbuddy and others over the years. Almost anything the gives you some visual rendering of what's going on is helpful. Personally, I've taken to using the regex stuff in the Jetbrains IDEs, mostly because I'm there already most of the time, and it's 'good enough'. But I'm not always at my own setup, and regexr and similar are always a good tool to have (and to share with others to show them how a regex is working).

If I did this all the time, I might not need tools like this. But complex regex are something I only dive in to a handful of times per year, and it's never the same problem twice.

Using such testing you can only prove a regex isn’t what you want for specific inputs, and make a number of plausibility checks, but you can’t prove it is what you want for all inputs. For that you need to do the reasoning on the expression as if you had built it yourself.

Thanks for pointing out regexr.com.

I really appreciate the availability of tools like that.

See also the Emacs built-in M-x re-builder (for elisp-style regexp).

Regex is much simpler than Git, but also the different regex implementations in use have a lot of subtle and less subtle differences, whereas there is roughly only one Git.

I use 3% of git commands and that's it. I probably use 3% of regex rules too.

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