Comment by nivertech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nivertech | Hacker News Reader

In decreasing order:

  - English (the ChatGPT/LLM programming language)
  - ML family
  - SQL (queries and DDL only - DSL)
  - Algol family (Algol 60/68, Pascal, Ada)
  - Logo

  NoSyntax is the best syntax?

  - TCL/Tk
  - Forth
  - Lisp family

  ...

  ETOOMANYSIGILS:
  - Perl / Ruby / Elixir

  ETOOMATHLIKE:
  - Prolog / Datalog / Erlang

  ETOOVERBOSE:
  - PHP / Java / C#

  ETOOANCIENT
  - SQL (Stored Procedures and Triggers)

  The worst:
  - various assembly languages
  - LaTeX
  - APL family
  - Brainf*ck

> Brainf*ck

Regular expressions look a lot like Brainfuck. A little trick is to break regexps up

into

various

lines

that

do

different

things

yes, if your PL supports multiline regex with end of line comments[1].

BTW: that's what I'm doing when programming in kdb+/q (APL family language), even though it's less idiomatic. But I prefer readability and maintainability over succinctness.

---

[1]

  var urlRegex = new RegExp(
    /(?:(?:(https?|ftp):)?\/\/)/.source       // protocol
    + /(?:([^:\n\r]+):([^@\n\r]+)@)?/.source  // user:pass
    + /(?:(?:www.)?([^/\n\r]+))/.source       // domain
    + /(\/[^?\n\r]+)?/.source                 // request
    + /(\?[^#\n\r]*)?/.source                 // query
    + /(#?[^\n\r]*)?/.source                  // anchor
  );

> Regular expressions look a lot like Brainfuck.

I'm sorry, have you ever seen a regular expression? No they do not.

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