I stubbornly hate code like this - but largely because of the security and correctness nightmare this is when combined with user generated data. For example, i

I stubbornly hate code like this - but largely because of the security and correctness nightmare this is when combined with user generated data. For example, in a library one of my coworkers wrote, object paths were flattened into strings (eg “user.address.city) and then regular expressions and things worked on that. Sometimes user data ended up in the path (eg “cookies.<uuid>”). But then - what happens if the user puts a dot in their cookie? Or a newline? Does the program crash? Are there security implications we aren’t seeing? What do we do if dots are meaningful? Do we filter them out? Error? Escape them (and add a flurry of unit tests?) Are there bugs in the regex if a path segment is an empty string? It’s a nightmare. Much better to have paths be a list of keys (eg [“cookies”, uuid]). That’s what they represent anyway, and the code will be faster, and this whole class of string parsing bugs disappears.