Reach: 91K
~1700 recommendations (Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter & Medium)
Regular expressions you can read: A new visual syntax (and UI)
Regular expressions are a technical tool, not unlike a domain specific programming language. It is intended for situations where you need to match patterns in text, in order to filter or manipulate it in various ways.
I created a novel design concept for learning and editing regular expressions (regexes). The main goal for this design is to aid learning and support memory of this tool that has a hard to memorize syntax for many.
With this article, I engaged the wide regex community online – Reddit and Hacker News – in discussing the barriers the regex language imposes on novices.
Regex is something lots of developers tend to have an opinion on. The novelty of combining the existing visualizations with keyboard and menu UI into a visual syntax spurred much conversation and two-way learning.
Position #3 in Hacker News, etc. See also: Opinion piece based on community discussion
Reflection (2024)
Recent advances in LLMs have finally obsoleted this work as translating from human readable language and back can now be done using generative AI.
Still, the discussion on Hacker News (link above) that followed publishing this seemed to shed light on the engineering community’s culture. Techies often don’t appreciate how different people have different levels of tech skills and more importantly, prioritize other skills but still could sometimes benefit from tech tools. Techies also tend to ignore use cases of groups who don’t have these skills. Also my awarded master’s thesis discusses these challenges.
There appears to be a prevailing sentiment within the engineering community favoring exclusivity, perpetuating an artificial meritocracy: only those ready to master highly esoteric syntaxes are deemed worthy of inclusion. This attitude risks keeping the community in a bubble, disconnected from the broader audience that could benefit from such tools. These attitudes are prone to further marginalize and propagate the disempowerment of users who don’t have the gifts expected in engineering communities.
Regular expressions, in essence, could be beneficial to a broader audience than currently utilizes them. There’s a growing hope that the advent of generative AI technologies might bridge this gap, making tools like regex more accessible to everyone. Yet, the challenge remains that many potential users are simply unaware of regex and its capabilities. The esoteric syntax does little to market the tool.