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"Evaluate it in a try..catch or whatever your language provides." "That's not very enterprisey of you" Oooh, I'm laughing so hard it hurts. It's been a partic

"Evaluate it in a try..catch or whatever your language provides." "That's not very enterprisey of you" Oooh, I'm laughing so hard it hurts. It's been a particularly 'enterprisey' week at work.

nolok 7y ago
"We could do it in a easy two liners that make sense, but, and hear me out here, what if we instead built an entire 10k LOC system that would barely work half of the time, using dozens of man hours for it ? And then never re-use it nor train anyone about it so that it becomes a mythical black box after your contract expires ?" "Well, I gave you my recommendation but hey at the end of the day you're the customer and I'm paid by the hour, so whatever you say boss" I now consider myself very lucky to be successful enough to not have to deal with projects like that, but back when I wasn't I paid quite a few things I wanted with those sort of stupid decisions.
murukesh_s 7y ago
Actually that is how enterprise works afaik. But few well funded startups on the other hand...
braythwayt 7y ago
That answer feels entirely wrong to me. As pointed out, it may be an XY answer: It presumes the person posing the question wants to validate regular expressions. But with something so blatantly self-referential, it actually feels unlikely to me that what they want to do is validate regular expressions. My guess is that they are generally curious about whether Regexen (PCRE or strict regular expressions) are powerful enough to validate Regexen (again whether PCRE or strict). XY answers are good for avoiding a lot of unnecessary yak-shaving/accidental complexity of a bad solution. But the conversation around whether we are talking about recognizing strict Regexen or PCRE Regexen, and in turn whether we are using strict Regexen or PCRE Regexen to recognize them is not accidental complexity or yak-shaving, it is intrinsic to understanding the nature of the problem and solution spaces. I too find the answer humorous for the "enterprisey" reference, but I think it would be a very bad answer if we are judging it strictly on the basis of its value.

"Evaluate it in a try..catch or whatever your language provides." "That's not very enterprisey of you" Oooh, I'm laughing so hard it hurts. It's been a particularly 'enterprisey' week at work.

nolok 7y ago

"We could do it in a easy two liners that make sense, but, and hear me out here, what if we instead built an entire 10k LOC system that would barely work half of the time, using dozens of man hours for it ? And then never re-use it nor train anyone about it so that it becomes a mythical black box after your contract expires ?" "Well, I gave you my recommendation but hey at the end of the day you're the customer and I'm paid by the hour, so whatever you say boss" I now consider myself very lucky to be successful enough to not have to deal with projects like that, but back when I wasn't I paid quite a few things I wanted with those sort of stupid decisions.

murukesh_s 7y ago

Actually that is how enterprise works afaik. But few well funded startups on the other hand...

braythwayt 7y ago

That answer feels entirely wrong to me. As pointed out, it may be an XY answer: It presumes the person posing the question wants to validate regular expressions. But with something so blatantly self-referential, it actually feels unlikely to me that what they want to do is validate regular expressions. My guess is that they are generally curious about whether Regexen (PCRE or strict regular expressions) are powerful enough to validate Regexen (again whether PCRE or strict). XY answers are good for avoiding a lot of unnecessary yak-shaving/accidental complexity of a bad solution. But the conversation around whether we are talking about recognizing strict Regexen or PCRE Regexen, and in turn whether we are using strict Regexen or PCRE Regexen to recognize them is not accidental complexity or yak-shaving, it is intrinsic to understanding the nature of the problem and solution spaces. I too find the answer humorous for the "enterprisey" reference, but I think it would be a very bad answer if we are judging it strictly on the basis of its value.