Regular expressions are like magic spells. I always have to look them up in a spellbook, and the people that know how to use them by heart are wizards.
@neon I guess i'm a wazzard ten.
@neon And like magic spells, they can very quickly go awry if you don't pay attention or mistype the special incantation.
@DexteriousJones Very true. And they're so concise that it's not very enjoyable to try to search for the part that goes wrong.
@hfaust This looks amazing. Now I know what my next installing-linux-for-fun distro will be.
@neon if you look at the two chapters about regex on tbe learning Perl book you never forget how to use them because of how well explain it is there or at least it worked for me :)
@gozes Yeah, it's mostly a case of never actually bothering to properly learn them. It's so easy to just check how to do the specific thing you need and then forget everything afterwards.
@neon *waves his magic regex wand*
@munin With http://sourcemage.org they very much are.
@neon Heh, nice.
The Warhammer 40k authors who came up with the 'techpriests' were...pretty spot on about how some folks go about handling their tech - repeating things by rote; being afraid to go about "innovating"; being all enthusiastic about the tech, certainly, but having no real -understanding- about how the thing works.
[I've had -several- clients of that nature]
@neon They also read like Enochian.
@drwho That they do. Which makes debugging a pain.
@neon And, like Enochian, you have to build them up character by character to make them work.
Assuming that you're not using the canned ones, which you have to take as given until you get proficient enough to really understand what they're on about.
Hi, @neon. This caught my attention because I collect regexps in a text file named "/home/demifiend/grimoires/regex.txt". :)
@starbreaker That's great! You might be interested in http://sourcemage.org
@neon I don't exactly know them all by heart, but agree they're magical. I also love them.
Or witches, as the case might be on the fediverse, with the town full of witches next door.