Comment by josefx
15 hours ago
I prefer the question about CPU pipelines that gets explained using a railroad switch as example. That one does a decent job of answering the question instead of going of on a, how to best put it, mentally deranged one page rant about regexes with the lazy throw away line at the end being the only thing that makes it qualify as an answer at all.
The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.
Of all the things I wrote on SO, including many actually-useful detailed explanations, it was this drunken rant that stuck, for some reason.
And for that I applaud you.
I know it's a hassle for a platform to moderate good rants from bad ones, and I decry SO from pushing too hard against these. I truly believe that our industry would benefit from more drunken technical rants.
I think of, and look up, this drunken rant at least once a year.
People have shared it here and on reddit a bunch of times because it's funny. I always found the pragmatic counter-answer about using regex and the comments about how brittle it is to parse XML properly assuming a specific structure to be much more useful.
For anyone wondering about the railroad switch post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processi...
This is new to me, and a wonderful dive that I wish I was aware of during my OS course. Thanks!
But--and this is crucial--the one about regexes is hilarious.
It also comes from a time in Internet culture when humor was appreciated instead of aggressively downvoted.
It's because the author put effort into it. Most (online) humour is lazy, low effort, regurgitated meme spam. See: Reddit. It should be downvoted and ideally never posted at all.
This is also the reason why I consider the lack of images in IRC a feature.