Melody 0.19.0 | A language that compiles to regular expressions and aims to be more readable and maintainable
Melody 0.19.0 | A language that compiles to regular expressions and aims to be more readable and maintainable

GitHub - yoav-lavi/melody: Melody is a language that compiles to regular expressions and aims to be more easily readable and maintainable

Who is this for? People who write lots of regular expressions won't need it because they know what they're doing and people who don't write lots of regular expressions probably won't find it anyway.
It just seems like a weird type of user who actually wants this.
I almost never use regex, but when I do, I'd love something like this. Exactly because I don't use regex enough to be bothered learning it's impenetrable syntax.
I learned enough to see how powerful it was, then started using it within Sublime Text to edit data from time to time. (Extract URLs or something from a websites code, reformat X or Y data for a script I’m hacking together) and I’ve slowly retained more and more of the elements I repeatedly use. I think I’ve actually got a pretty good grasp on it. Maybe you should be using it more.
i mean, you can learn the basics of matching in 30 minutes or less. that core knowledge will be broadly applicable across any tool that uses regex. things get much easier once to have a handle on the basics.
…or you can learn this regex dsl and still have to learn regex. the difference is you’re learning a non-portable regex syntax.
I just learned to type what I want from a regex in chatgpt and call it a day. It works pretty well.
Also fuck regex.
I think it's for me. I occasionally need regular expressions, like any career programmer. I also hate regular expressions. I have to complely relearn the every time I use them.
I'm not a programmer, but I do have to write scripts, and I'm the same way with regex.
OK, let's say you've got a bunch of regexes in a source repository that need to get modified frequently. It can be difficult to code-review complex regexes, and even harder to code-review changes to an existing regex.
Something like this might actually help. A change to a complex regex might actually produce a more clear diff of a subset of lines.
Also, I think being able to comment in the middle of a regex would be super handy for that type of code.
But you can do that already in many languages using extended Regex syntax.This doesn't add anything except more verbosity and another syntax to learn.
me for example. I don't write regex often enough to be really familar with the cryptic syntax. But I do use them every once in a while and dread the occasion every time. Having a more expressive way to write pattern matching instructions would be really useful to me.
But then you'll have to learn the syntax of this instead.
I suspect that if you actually start using Melody you won't find it as helpful as you think you might. Maybe I'm wrong. Let's see in a year's time.
It might be used in education. Some who learned it this way might stick to it, or advance to your first group.