The five stages of dealing with Regex

Description

A four-panel comic strip meme illustrating the struggle of working with regular expressions. In the first panel, a stick-figure character looks in a mirror, confidently stating, 'I AM A GROWN MAN'. The second panel shows him at a desk, saying, 'I'M A BIG ADULT'. In the third panel, he sits at a laptop with the screen showing 'regex for dummies' and says, 'I CAN DO THIS', while a massive, cryptic regex pattern looms beside him. The final panel depicts the character crying uncontrollably in front of the laptop. This meme captures the universal developer journey with regex: starting with confidence, underestimating the complexity, and ultimately breaking down in frustration. It hilariously portrays how regex, with its dense and arcane syntax, can humble even experienced programmers

Common Tags

RegularExpressions DeveloperHumor DeveloperFrustration CodeComplexity RelatableHumor

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Some say that if you have a problem and you think regex is the solution, now you have two problems. They're wrong. You have a problem, a regex, and a future maintenance ticket that no one will ever want to touch

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Some say that if you have a problem and you think regex is the solution, now you have two problems. They're wrong. You have a problem, a regex, and a future maintenance ticket that no one will ever want to touch
Anonymous

“I can nail this email regex,” said every senior dev right before deploying a 40-KB pattern, paging Ops, and quietly drafting an RFC for the new “just-click-the-confirmation-link” microservice
Anonymous

After 20 years in the industry, I've learned there are two types of developers: those who pretend to understand regex, and those who've given up pretending and just use an online regex builder while praying the Stack Overflow answer from 2012 still works
Anonymous

The classic regex journey: 'I have a problem. I know, I'll use regular expressions!' Now you have two problems - and one of them is explaining to your therapist why you're having nightmares about nested lookaheads and catastrophic backtracking
Anonymous

15+ YoE and regex still forces a regex101 tab orgy just to validate an email
Anonymous

Regex is the only quick fix where a stray .* turns your 99.9% SLO into a backtracking incident and a 3 a.m. postmortem
Anonymous

"Quick regex" is how you accidentally ship a write-only DSL: PCRE nods, RE2 refuses, and the CEO's email is suddenly "invalid"
@RiedleroD 5y

me when regex
@RiedleroD 5y

btw that regex in that screenshot wouldn't parse
1. @chupasaurus 5y
  
  btw it's full version doesn't cover 100% of cases it was created for anyway
  
  @RiedleroD 5y
  
  pain
  
  @chupasaurus 5y
  
  Between choosing their current state or addition of Turing completeness I'm for the former all the way.
  
  @chupasaurus 5y
  
  Jeez I have Vietnam flashbacks of sendmail.cf rn
@RiedleroD 5y

pretty sure
Сифуд Кстолу 5y

Шло третье тысячелетие...
@Sashman 5y

http://neilk.net/blog/2000/06/01/abigails-regex-to-test-for-prime-numbers/
1. @chupasaurus 5y
  
  It's a Perl script, not a regexp. There are no while or write functions = no Turing completeness.
  
  @p4vook 5y
  
  By the way, printf is Turing-complete
  
  @chupasaurus 5y
  
  relying heavily on inner function calls, but yeah it is Basically it can call a nice portion of C standard lib
@Sashman 5y

Turing completeness, my ass
@Sashman 5y

and deterministic termination, yes
@qwnick 5y

Idk, its not that hard
@RKRohk 5y

why did I spend 15 minutes trying to figure out what this regex was supposed to do
1. @lord_nani 5y
  
  Its cropped
@RKRohk 5y

I realized that 15 minutes late

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The five stages of dealing with Regex

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