this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
249 points (93.1% liked)
Programming
17313 readers
525 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.
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.