Oh great. A new flavour of regex, but it’s less portable and more verbose. https://xkcd.com/927/
I wouldn’t consider Melody a new flavour of regex as it compiles to ECMAScript regular expressions.
I’d consider being more verbose than regular expressions as a great thing for what this project aims to do, regular expressions are very write optimized which is the wrong (IMO) tradeoff to make in a shared codebase (or even your personal code that’s more than a few days old) where code is read much more often.
if it can only be used to create regexes, and all programs compile to regexes, then it is a regex flavor in itself.
And let’s not kid ourselves, regexes are not that hard. They can look cryptic, but in most cases they’re not really that hard to understand.
all this does is make it much more verbose and introduce the HUGE inconvenience of a separate compiler for regexes, since regexes are typically embedded within other files written in other languages that this compiler can’t understand. So somehow regexes would end up needing their own file.
respectfully disagree—this is very much a regex dsl. folks still need to conceptually understand regex to use this, which begs the question about who this is for.
the best use case i can think of is large and complicated expressions, but i’d need to see more of that to have a definitive opinion.
but it’s less portable and more verbose
you misspelled “less obtuse and more expressive”
Also it doesn’t compete with regex. It’s an abstraction layer. You know, the thing programmers have been building since the dawn of programming to make everyone’s lives easier. There’s a reason why everyone who has the option to has stopped working directly with assembly and C.
Who is this for? People who write lots of regular expressions won’t need it because they know what they’re doing and people who don’t write lots of regular expressions probably won’t find it anyway.
It just seems like a weird type of user who actually wants this.
I almost never use regex, but when I do, I’d love something like this. Exactly because I don’t use regex enough to be bothered learning it’s impenetrable syntax.
I just learned to type what I want from a regex in chatgpt and call it a day. It works pretty well.
Also fuck regex.
i mean, you can learn the basics of matching in 30 minutes or less. that core knowledge will be broadly applicable across any tool that uses regex. things get much easier once to have a handle on the basics.
…or you can learn this regex dsl and still have to learn regex. the difference is you’re learning a non-portable regex syntax.
You’re right, I can learn the basics of regex in 30 minutes. Then I can write my one regex. Then I can forget the basics of regex in 3 minutes, because regex’s syntax is random garbage that makes no intuitive sense, and I hate and suck at memorizing nonsense. Repeat every 4-16 months.
It’s true though that regex is entrenched enough that even if something is easier to read, it’s unlikely that it’ll replace regex any time soon. You’d need a couple big names to adopt it, then many years.
But if there’s a readable replacement that can convert to and from regex - well, screw it, I’m in. Even if I’m required to use regex in some program, if I can write something that makes sense without the requisite half hour of googling crap, I’ll just use it as a separate tool to make and read regex strings.
Sure. I just very rarely need just basic regexes.
And once you go beyond these the syntax gets very obtuse. Which means I’m spending an hour+ googling something close to what I need and then using a sandbox to try and tweak it until it does what I need. Then I paste something into my code that I won’t understand anymore 5 minutes into the future - which isn’t exactly great for maintainability.
I learned enough to see how powerful it was, then started using it within Sublime Text to edit data from time to time. (Extract URLs or something from a websites code, reformat X or Y data for a script I’m hacking together) and I’ve slowly retained more and more of the elements I repeatedly use. I think I’ve actually got a pretty good grasp on it. Maybe you should be using it more.
I’m not a programmer by trade so I only program when I need something and regex is a small subset of that. Usually I find something someone else wrote and adapt it to my needs. But it would be nice to be able to write things from scratch, this would be a helpful tool for that for sure.
me for example. I don’t write regex often enough to be really familar with the cryptic syntax. But I do use them every once in a while and dread the occasion every time. Having a more expressive way to write pattern matching instructions would be really useful to me.
But then you’ll have to learn the syntax of this instead.
I suspect that if you actually start using Melody you won’t find it as helpful as you think you might. Maybe I’m wrong. Let’s see in a year’s time.
I mean it’s JS. I’m not touching that if I can help it. But what you describe is less of a problem with the concept and more one with an immature technology.
I think it’s for me. I occasionally need regular expressions, like any career programmer. I also hate regular expressions. I have to complely relearn the every time I use them.
OK, let’s say you’ve got a bunch of regexes in a source repository that need to get modified frequently. It can be difficult to code-review complex regexes, and even harder to code-review changes to an existing regex.
Something like this might actually help. A change to a complex regex might actually produce a more clear diff of a subset of lines.
Also, I think being able to comment in the middle of a regex would be super handy for that type of code.
Nothing makes sense about this, how can anyone understand this. I think I will stick with standard RegExp. It’s short, it’s simple yet complex at the same time. And it gets the job done
Oh nice. An entire language that is write-only.
Just use parser combinators
