Which is a way of doing Javascript to check or is it it's own coding language? As I haven't heard of that even when I was taught Javascript for a year before noping out nor was a search on the internet that too useful except pointing to Javascript.
That was a joke.
Regexp is regular expression language to check input for matching patterns,
it's not programming language by itself and you can sue regexp in basically
every programming language (and even shell scripts). It's so powerful tool once you learn it you will use it (if not daily) at least once a week.
The point of joke is that, similiar with perl scripts, if you write long regexp expression the very moment you avert your eyes from it you instantly forget what the hell it supposed to do (and at this point it's easier to rewrite from scratch than analyze and fix it).
For example basic bitch regexp for email parsing would be
Code:
\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,}\b
yet when you get deeper into RFC 5322 specification we get
Code:
\A[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_‘{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_‘{|}~-]+)*@
(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\z
or
Code:
\A(?=[a-z0-9@.!#$%&'*+/=?^_‘{|}~-]{6,254}\z)
(?=[a-z0-9.!#$%&'*+/=?^_‘{|}~-]{1,64}@)
[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_‘{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_‘{|}~-]+)*
@ (?:(?=[a-z0-9-]{1,63}\.)[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+
(?=[a-z0-9-]{1,63}\z)[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\z
or
Code:
\A(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_‘{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_‘{|}~-]+)*
| "(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]
| \\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])*")
@ (?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?
| \[(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}
(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?|[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]:
(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]
| \\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)
\])\z
Every - and I can't stress this enough - every character and it's placement in all of these snippets is very important and when missing everything becomes unusable.
Now try imagining writting this lovecraftian eldritch abomination but you have to stop halfway just because boss called you or something. You are royally fucked at this point.
That's was the point of this joke. Spaghetti code brings misery to everyone having to edit it at some point; regexp/perl are pinnacle of this issue with regexp being basically undebuggable when something goes wrong.
Is this what asimofu is going through? If so then it won't be as tragic as regexp refactoring issue. Basing my opinion on years of experience with chink coders and their culture of glorified throwing copy-paste code into project and seeing what will stick - asimofu is rather competent, programming wise. Even if he makes some spaghetti code here and there it would be always fixable, maximum of few days of refactoring and it's good to go (for some time, at least). That's why I think the most glaring issue with this project is him focusing on minute details of no importance for days and taking long procrastination breaks in-between resulting in [Abandoned] tags topped with nothingburger version bumps.
