Fun With Regex: Trying To Approach Natural Language Parsing

I hate Regular Expressions. I don’t hate them because they’re broken, or stupid, or don’t work. Rather, I hate them because I’m one of those few people who started programming back in the days of the Commodore Vic-20 and who still has not taken the time to learn them. Actually, I don’t hate them at all, I simply fear them. It’s like talking to a 50 year old who says “I...

The Responsibility of Web App Programmers

I had an interesting experience yesterday that illustrated to me the danger of building Twitter-based web applications without seriously considering the consequences of what you are doing. It was a perfect low-consequence wake-up call on the incredible responsibility web application programmers have. It was basically a case of my Twitter stream being SPAMmed by an application that I didn’t know existed and...