[oak perl] Regular Expressions

[David Fetter]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 10:35:46AM -0800, Belden Lyman wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 15:37, David Fetter wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 03:26:14PM -0800, Belden Lyman wrote:
> > > 
> > > Can anyone explain this?
> > 
> > Um, yeah.  You're writing code as cleverly as possible, and here's
> > what Kernighan had to say about that:
> > 
> >     Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first
> >     place.  Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as
> >     possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug
> >     it.
> > 
> 
> Emerson:
> 
>       I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

I know that what Kernighan said about debugging is the truth.  The
reason I quoted him was to add the weight of experience--not just
mine, but that of one of the people who actually developed Unix and
C--to what I said.

> > Belden, you're a smart, sensible guy.  Why are you doing this to
> > yourself?
> 
> Confucius:
> 
>      Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without
>      learning is perilous.

So why the labor lost, or the peril?  To what purpose would one
attempt to learn how to write code that by its nature is impossible to
debug or maintain?  Yes, there are obfuscated coding contests, and
they reward exactly the wrong behavior.  And no, I don't buy the idea
that obfuscating code shows anything good about the person's other
coding skills.  I have found that the correllation is, in fact,
negative.  What would you think about the entrants--never mind the
winners--in an obfuscated English contest?

Cheers,
D
-- 
David Fetter david at fetter.org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 510 893 6100   mobile: +1 415 235 3778

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