• fanha (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    fanha:
    Satanicpuppy:
    VB6 and Regular Expressions?! VB6 is obviously a WTF on its own (and I think most of us knew that it could gobble up massive amounts of memory) but why in the holy hell would you do a ton of RegEx through VB at all? It's crap like that that Perl was made for.

    No, Perl is not for regular expressions. WTF.

    FUD

    How's it FUD? Perl's regex engine has best case O(n), and worst case O(n^2). Other implementations have guarenteed O(n). You judge the general quality of a general algorithm by its worst case, not its general case. Only specialized algorithms should be measured based on specialized cases. Take note of the author's reply in that thread; the point is, unless you're someone who knows the tricks of Perl's particular regex implementation, its performance is not going to have any sane guarentees (you certainly can't port a regex string and assume it will perform well).

    So the real WTF is suggesting someone try doing "a ton" of regex work in a language whose implementation doesn't guarentee that your regex won't cause a hang.

  • Your Name (unregistered) in reply to wee
    wee:
    Satanicpuppy:
    VB6 and Regular Expressions?! VB6 is obviously a WTF on its own (and I think most of us knew that it could gobble up massive amounts of memory) but why in the holy hell would you do a ton of RegEx through VB at all? It's crap like that that Perl was made for.

    You haven't had your kool-aid yet today, have you? .Net, VB, C#... languages of the fucking gods, man.

    If you think .Net is a language you probably have the wrong job, or hopefully you have another job.

  • fanha (unregistered) in reply to Your Name
    Your Name:
    wee:
    Satanicpuppy:
    VB6 and Regular Expressions?! VB6 is obviously a WTF on its own (and I think most of us knew that it could gobble up massive amounts of memory) but why in the holy hell would you do a ton of RegEx through VB at all? It's crap like that that Perl was made for.

    You haven't had your kool-aid yet today, have you? .Net, VB, C#... languages of the fucking gods, man.

    If you think .Net is a language you probably have the wrong job, or hopefully you have another job.

    You've never coded .NET CLI in MSIL/CIL?

  • Wyrd (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Some Wonk:
    Cue the Four Yorkshire Men in 5....4....3...

    2... 1...

    Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

    .. beat ... Oh, *those* guys, right now I get it. Yeah, that was a pretty good sketch.

    -- Furry cows moo and decompress.

  • (cs) in reply to Mr. Rhetoric
    Mr. Rhetoric:
    diaphanein:
    Zylon:
    "colleauge"? For the love of god, is it that hard to run a spell-check pass on these things before posting them?
    For that matter, anyone care to explain what the fuck "clowder" means? (rhetorical question)

    No. It's a rhetorical question. Answering it would be a WTF.

    I don't know that it's a rhetorical question at all:

    (1) A rhetorical question is generally defined as one to which no answer is expected. Now, really. How could such a thing exist on a site like this? (Answers on a moebius strip, please.) (2) Rhetorical questions are normally posed to make a rhetorical point. Otherwise they're hardly rhetorical, are they? That would be more of a WTF question. Try as I might, I fail to see a rhetorical point here.

    No, this is more of a category error.

    Kudos to Wikipedia on this one, btw. Normally, the thing is just infuriating. In this case it comes up with Henry Denham, who invented the "rhetorical question mark" back in the 1580s.

    Even if this isn't true, I want to believe that it is.

    As for "clowder," well, miaow! Recursively.

  • (cs) in reply to pink_fairy
    pink_fairy:
    (1) A rhetorical question is generally defined as one to which no answer is expected. Now, really. How could such a thing exist on a site like this? (Answers on a moebius strip, please.)
    How am I supposed to fold this comment box into the shape of a Moebius strip?
  • (cs) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    "colleauge"? For the love of god, is it that hard to run a spell-check pass on these things before posting them?

    For the love of god, don't you have anything more important to worry about than typos?

    Pedants think they're showing people how intelligent they are; I think it's actually the opposite.

  • (cs) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    VB6 and Regular Expressions?! VB6 is obviously a WTF on its own (and I think most of us knew that it could gobble up massive amounts of memory) but why in the holy hell would you do a ton of RegEx through VB at all? It's crap like that that Perl was made for.

    Right. So you have this difficult to maintain mess of VB6 and regexes, and your suggestion is to add yet another language and more source code (in that new language) to the mix?

    We have two problems (VB6 and regexes). Add Perl, and we have THREE problems.

  • (cs) in reply to Pim
    Pim:
    pink_fairy:
    (1) A rhetorical question is generally defined as one to which no answer is expected. Now, really. How could such a thing exist on a site like this? (Answers on a moebius strip, please.)
    How am I supposed to fold this comment box into the shape of a Moebius strip?
    See, I tried to create a rhetorical question on this site, and even physical impossibility doesn't make it work ...

    ... that, and I can't find the BBCode for a rhetorical question mark.

  • Moe (unregistered)

    Thre real WTF is XSLT.

  • (cs) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    fanguad:
    If regular expressions are never the solution to your problems, you do not have very interesting problems.
    I don't know why, but somehow I get the impression this should be prefixed by "Confucious says".

    Confucius didn't say much of what he gets credit for; he just gets the copyleft credit-of-the-doubt

  • pizzaguy (unregistered) in reply to pink_fairy
    pink_fairy:
    I don't know that it's a rhetorical question at all:

    (1) A rhetorical question is generally defined as one to which no answer is expected. Now, really. How could such a thing exist on a site like this? (Answers on a moebius strip, please.) (2) Rhetorical questions are normally posed to make a rhetorical point. Otherwise they're hardly rhetorical, are they? That would be more of a WTF question. Try as I might, I fail to see a rhetorical point here.

    No, this is more of a category error.

    Kudos to Wikipedia on this one, btw. Normally, the thing is just infuriating. In this case it comes up with Henry Denham, who invented the "rhetorical question mark" back in the 1580s.

    Even if this isn't true, I want to believe that it is.

    As for "clowder," well, miaow! Recursively.

    I'll bite. A rhetorical question is one that you ask another person when you both already know the answer. Like, "is the sky blue?"

    You don't want the answer because you already know it. You're asking it to prove a point, hence, "rhetorical". A better one would be "how long until we stop reading about XML WTFs?"

  • (cs) in reply to Moe
    Moe:
    Thre real WTF is XSLT.
    I can't, for the life of me, work out why this man is unregistered.

    Genius!

    We all want to know: Where the Hell are Larry, Curly, Shemp, and Curly-Joe?

    Are they (and I realise this is controversial -- it even borders on a flame ware) even more cretinous than you?

    Jest askin'

  • (cs) in reply to pizzaguy
    pizzaguy:
    pink_fairy:
    I don't know that it's a rhetorical question at all:

    (1) A rhetorical question is generally defined as one to which no answer is expected. Now, really. How could such a thing exist on a site like this? (Answers on a moebius strip, please.) (2) Rhetorical questions are normally posed to make a rhetorical point. Otherwise they're hardly rhetorical, are they? That would be more of a WTF question. Try as I might, I fail to see a rhetorical point here.

    No, this is more of a category error.

    Kudos to Wikipedia on this one, btw. Normally, the thing is just infuriating. In this case it comes up with Henry Denham, who invented the "rhetorical question mark" back in the 1580s.

    Even if this isn't true, I want to believe that it is.

    As for "clowder," well, miaow! Recursively.

    I'll bite. A rhetorical question is one that you ask another person when you both already know the answer. Like, "is the sky blue?"

    You don't want the answer because you already know it. You're asking it to prove a point, hence, "rhetorical". A better one would be "how long until we stop reading about XML WTFs?"

    Good bite.

    Point (1).

    I like this game. Try again?

  • Bobbo (unregistered) in reply to KenW
    KenW:
    Zylon:
    "colleauge"? For the love of god, is it that hard to run a spell-check pass on these things before posting them?

    For the love of god, don't you have anything more important to worry about than typos?

    Pedants think they're showing people how intelligent they are; I think it's actually the opposite.

    Isn't God a proper noun? Unless you meant "For the love of a god"?

    Just sayin' like!

  • iToad (unregistered) in reply to Mogri
    Mogri:
    Don't know about anyone else, but I want to see the Excel version.

    I don't think that is a good idea. Looking at the Excel version could be the software developer equivalent of staring at an arc welder without wearing a face shield.

  • (cs) in reply to Da' Man
    Da' Man:
    In a completely unrelated WTF: I had to get up at 4:30 tonight because my mother-in-law had to catch a plane at 7 AM. (WTF # 1)

    Next thing, I had to call here a Taxi (WTF #2)

    But unfortunately I seemed to have mistyped the number and thus rang somebody out of bed (WTF #3, or #1 from his perspective)

    Now I wonder what is worse: being so tired that you are not able to dial a simple telephone number, or having a phone number which is similar to a taxi centre?

    Just asking ;-)

    10 years ago, my phone number was only one digit off from a "Salsa" Dancing school. We'd frequently get calls asking for dance courses, and even once got asked "Do you dance here?"

  • (cs) in reply to iToad
    iToad:
    Mogri:
    Don't know about anyone else, but I want to see the Excel version.

    I don't think that is a good idea. Looking at the Excel version could be the software developer equivalent of staring at an arc welder without wearing a face shield.

    I'd equate that experience to watching a nuclear explosion up front, without an NBC suit.

  • (cs)

    Dave could easily have worked where I work; all of that sounds disturbingly familiar. Especially the Excel.

  • David (unregistered) in reply to mbv
    mbv:
    When do people learn that some things can be expressed in regexes, but are better handled in a different way? Like, using parser generators (yes I know, steep learning curve), or an existing library to search through HTML?

    Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

    Yeah, you could use flexx and bison. Then you'd have three problems. Four if you count the regex's in flexx.

    At this point the best approach is to mercilessly beat the person who gave you the data until they agree to export it in XML format, so you can parse it using one of many standard off-the-shelf tools.

  • Alice Bible (unregistered)

    It's all true, but worse. I was there.

    When developing, or perhaps trying to debug something blind because the different code paths meant that the development mode was often useless, a key press at the wrong moment could activate the hideous monster lurking underneath.

    When the full software starts running in the background, it updates all the XSL - it downloads the production copy via a creaking old ASP script. A single script which handles, or in fact barely handles, all control and data for the application, dropping data all over the place.

    You complete your feverish hack to make the script work again - did "Dave" mention that reg exp changes could only be made Live? - and then go to SVN to quickly get the corresponding changes checked in. Getting those XSL changes to production is going to take at least 15 minutes, and that's assuming no-one else (including automated processes) kicks off a conflicting build, in which case they both fail. There's no reason for the builds to kill each other, that's just the way it's always been. Are we allowed to fix this? No.

    Except when you look at SVN, all your files have changed. The brilliant application has, silently, brokenly, replaced your working copies with special versions, filtered through the majesty of a tatty ASP script so that all the indentation is changed. Now, I hope you remember exactly which files you have been editing.

    When this happens it is acceptable to scream and run away.

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    It used to be worse It used to be worse I debugged around And finally found The source of my curse That damned XML Was giving me hell Name conventions were sad Redundancy bad It used to be worse
    Gets a 10/10 from me. Nice poem and it fits the story.
  • (cs) in reply to Bobbo
    Bobbo:
    KenW:
    Zylon:
    "colleauge"? For the love of god, is it that hard to run a spell-check pass on these things before posting them?
    For the love of god, don't you have anything more important to worry about than typos?

    Pedants think they're showing people how intelligent they are; I think it's actually the opposite.

    Isn't God a proper noun? Unless you meant "For the love of a god"?

    Just sayin' like!

    Loki isn't particular about stuff like that.

  • (cs) in reply to Steeldragon
    Steeldragon:
    Code Dependent:
    It used to be worse It used to be worse I debugged around And finally found The source of my curse That damned XML Was giving me hell Name conventions were sad Redundancy bad It used to be worse
    Gets a 10/10 from me. Nice poem and it fits the story.
    Thank you! But actually, it's not a poem. It's supposed to be sung to the tune of "It Had to be You".
  • jmzrbnsn (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    The root cause of ALL madness...

  • jmzrbnsn (unregistered) in reply to jmzrbnsn
    jmzrbnsn:
    The root cause of ALL madness...
    I meant, CEOs are the root cause of ALL madness...
  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Steeldragon:
    Code Dependent:
    It used to be worse It used to be worse I debugged around And finally found The source of my curse That damned XML Was giving me hell Name conventions were sad Redundancy bad It used to be worse
    Gets a 10/10 from me. Nice poem and it fits the story.
    Thank you! But actually, it's not a poem. It's supposed to be sung to the tune of "It Had to be You".
    sorry then, but i've never heard that song.
  • Sven (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that the VB6 application was using over 2GB RAM, more than the amount of address space it could conceivably consume. Unless of course the application had been marked large address aware (I seriously doubt whether that's safe to do with a VB6 application) and was running on a system using either the /3G switch or a 64 bit version of Windows. :P

    (yes, this is tongue-in-cheek, I do not begrudge Alex the user of hyperboles)

  • Tootie (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Steeldragon:
    Code Dependent:
    It used to be worse It used to be worse I debugged around And finally found The source of my curse That damned XML Was giving me hell Name conventions were sad Redundancy bad It used to be worse
    Gets a 10/10 from me. Nice poem and it fits the story.
    Thank you! But actually, it's not a poem. It's supposed to be sung to the tune of "It Had to be You".
    You just went from alright poem to awesome song!
  • (cs)

    If you ever have to work with regular expressions download the free tool Expresso from Ultrapico. http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm

    It will document the regular expression for you and even generate the .NET code to run it. Awesome tool.

  • (cs) in reply to David
    David:
    mbv:
    When do people learn that some things can be expressed in regexes, but are better handled in a different way? Like, using parser generators (yes I know, steep learning curve), or an existing library to search through HTML?

    Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

    Yeah, you could use flexx and bison. Then you'd have three problems. Four if you count the regex's in flexx.

    At this point the best approach is to mercilessly beat the person who gave you the data until they agree to export it in XML format, so you can parse it using one of many standard off-the-shelf tools.

    Which are mostly built on flex and bison combinations wrapped up in an enterprisey front-end. Now you have *five* problems.
  • (cs) in reply to diaphanein
    diaphanein:
    Bobbo:
    How very public spirited of you. Has she recovered from being attacked yet?
    She was never attacked, some ass just wouldn't leave the lab at close.
    *sigh* Some people just don't know how to make use of the tools they have at hand to get the job done. 
    net send /DOMAIN "WTF U. Computer Labs are now closed. Normal operations suspended for overnight maintenance tasks."
shutdown \\<computername> /r /y /c /t:30 "Overnight filing system wipe and restore beginning in 30 seconds."
    [cue sounds of abject panic from other side of the room]
  • Cat Chowder (unregistered) in reply to pizzaguy
    pizzaguy:
    I'll bite. A rhetorical question is one that you ask another person when you both already know the answer. Like, "is the sky blue?"

    How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?

    captcha: sino

  • Mr^B (unregistered) in reply to Cat Chowder
    Cat Chowder:
    pizzaguy:
    I'll bite. A rhetorical question is one that you ask another person when you both already know the answer. Like, "is the sky blue?"

    How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?

    captcha: sino

    None.

  • Whoevar (unregistered) in reply to Cat Chowder

    42

  • SR (unregistered) in reply to amischiefr
    amischiefr:
    Overuse of regex, because you think it "looks cool" or for whatever reason you use it over something basic and simple, is all too common.

    I have to own up to that one. It's often a side effect of finally "getting" regular expressions.

    I like to think I've got over it now.

  • Olaf Thormaehlen (unregistered)

    "People might look at a problem and think: Oh, I'm going to solve that with regualr expressions.

    Then they have two problems."

    (Jamie Zawinski)

  • Da' Man (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    net send /DOMAIN "WTF U. Computer Labs are now closed. Normal operations suspended for overnight maintenance tasks."
shutdown \\<computername> /r /y /c /t:30 "Overnight filing system wipe and restore beginning in 30 seconds."
    [cue sounds of abject panic from other side of the room]
    I've been at a University (Trier, Germany, in case someone wonders) where they just power off the machines 20 minutes before the building closes.

    And when I say "power off", I mean they just switch off the electric supply. Poff! You should hear the screems from those who haven't saved their data yet (or were just in the process of saving...)

  • (cs) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Some Wonk:
    Cue the Four Yorkshire Men in 5....4....3...

    2... 1...

    Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

    Trouble at the mill. One on't cross beams gone owt askew on treadle.

    What do you do know?

  • me thinks (unregistered)

    Joined here six months ago and they always tell me "it is easy to do that". But no one has ever found anything easy including the people who says so.

  • John (unregistered) in reply to dcardani
    dcardani:
    Matt smirked. "But even before that... it used to be worse." Matt went on to describe the first version of the software, which had been written by the CEO. In Excel. I'll spare you the details.

    Yeah, I've been there. I once worked for a company where their flagship product started out as the owner's son's high school comp sci final project. They were still using Delphi to build it, and needless to say it was a piece of crap that didn't work correctly, was hard to maintain and impossible to update. And of course, they had no idea how to write software properly. Shortest job I ever had. It was so retarded I started looking for a new job just a few months after being hired.

    And today I described to my boss a requirement for parsing multimegabyte text files into CSV, and he suggested GWBASIC.

  • Ted (unregistered) in reply to Mr^B
    Mr^B:
    Cat Chowder:
    pizzaguy:
    I'll bite. A rhetorical question is one that you ask another person when you both already know the answer. Like, "is the sky blue?"

    How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?

    captcha: sino

    None.

    I agree- none. You've already called him a man in the question

  • MrOli (unregistered)

    "Fewer bad", shorely?

  • Zapp Brannigan (unregistered) in reply to John
    John:
    dcardani:
    Matt smirked. "But even before that... it used to be worse." Matt went on to describe the first version of the software, which had been written by the CEO. In Excel. I'll spare you the details.

    Yeah, I've been there. I once worked for a company where their flagship product started out as the owner's son's high school comp sci final project. They were still using Delphi to build it, and needless to say it was a piece of crap that didn't work correctly, was hard to maintain and impossible to update. And of course, they had no idea how to write software properly. Shortest job I ever had. It was so retarded I started looking for a new job just a few months after being hired.

    And today I described to my boss a requirement for parsing multimegabyte text files into CSV, and he suggested GWBASIC.

    I'd use QBASIC.

  • rioshin (unregistered) in reply to Zapp Brannigan
    Zapp Brannigan:
    John:
    And today I described to my boss a requirement for parsing multimegabyte text files into CSV, and he suggested GWBASIC.
    I'd use QBASIC.
    No no! Has to be the mighties BASIC of them all, the one that came with the C64. Basic 2.0, I think it was.
  • (cs) in reply to bjolling
    bjolling:
    Bob:
    Some Wonk:
    Cue the Four Yorkshire Men in 5....4....3...

    2... 1...

    Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

    Trouble at the mill. One on't cross beams gone owt askew on treadle.

    What do you do know?

    I don't know - Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all - I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

  • (cs) in reply to rioshin
    rioshin:
    Zapp Brannigan:
    John:
    And today I described to my boss a requirement for parsing multimegabyte text files into CSV, and he suggested GWBASIC.
    I'd use QBASIC.
    No no! Has to be the mighties BASIC of them all, the one that came with the C64. Basic 2.0, I think it was.
    You may not know it, but you just gave propz to a Microsoft product.
  • (cs) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    bjolling:
    Bob:
    Some Wonk:
    Cue the Four Yorkshire Men in 5....4....3...

    2... 1...

    Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

    Trouble at the mill. One on't cross beams gone owt askew on treadle.

    What do you do know?

    I don't know - Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all - I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

    Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

  • Mark (unregistered) in reply to KenW
    KenW:
    Satanicpuppy:
    VB6 and Regular Expressions?! VB6 is obviously a WTF on its own (and I think most of us knew that it could gobble up massive amounts of memory) but why in the holy hell would you do a ton of RegEx through VB at all? It's crap like that that Perl was made for.

    Right. So you have this difficult to maintain mess of VB6 and regexes, and your suggestion is to add yet another language and more source code (in that new language) to the mix?

    We have two problems (VB6 and regexes). Add Perl, and we have THREE problems.

    Not according to all the anti-any-MS-language brats on this site. If it's an MS language, then clearly "that's the RWTF!111!! i iz haxorz el337!!!". Go fuck yourselves.

    There's something to be said about consolidating your platform, even if it means using less desirable technologies. Let's say you have a small team of 3 developers. And they're all VB devs for your all-VB.NET app. Why introduce PERL into the equation? Now when you worry about turnover you have to add PERL qualifications to the mix. And what if it's only one of the devs pushing for PERL? Unless you want to train the others, there's no coverage if he gets hit be the proverbial bus.

    Now, in all practicality, ceteris paribus, a PERL developer is probably a more qualified developer than a VB.NET developer. But that doesn't mean you should turn a 1 language app into a multi-language app "cuz those other lang's are kewl" simply for that reason alone.

  • (cs) in reply to Cat Chowder
    Cat Chowder:
    How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?
    42

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