Wow, I just heard a comment regarding programming last weekend and already
I've had opportunity to pass it along three times -- now this makes a
fourth:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Bixby [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>
> Ted Ashton wrote:
> > The "ugliness" about which Wirt commented was, I think, the
> regular expression,
> > not Perl, per se, as regexen are found many other places
> (including Python).
>
> Regexps kick butt as far as string manipulation power goes,
> but they can be
> very painful indeed for humans to read.  ;-)

The comment: "be very careful about being 'clever' when programming.
Studies have shown it takes 5 to 10 times the effort to maintain a program
as to write it in the first place, so if you are as clever AS YOU CAN BE
when writing a program, you have to hire someone 10 times MORE CLEVER THAN
YOU to maintain it."

regexps fall directly into this chasm of "cleverness", especially when
"humans" have to come back years, months, days [heck, even hours] later to
"figure out what they wrote and why it works (or not)"

[unless someone is clever enough to write a
regexp-to-human-readable-AND-BACK conversion program... ;) ]