Is it really though? There are tons of characters you can add to a regex that have difficult if not impossible to mentally comprehend impacts on the potential matches. That's why you need 100 test cases for every 10 characters you write in a regex. Regex itself could all be a footgun by this standard. No one in the history of no one has ever thought "why dont I just add a random character to my regex I don't need or understand" that's just boogie man level irrational fear if you think this has any bearing on the ease of use of ruby.

Regexes are not fundamentally hard. People make regexes hard by trying to parse things by sight rather than finding a spec. If you have a spec, and it can be parsed by a regular expression, they are pretty damn rote to implement.

If you aren’t working from a specified input grammar, the task is going to be borderline impossible no matter the tool and you’re going to have a bad time. If you aren’t working with a regular grammar, this is the wrong tool for the job and again you’re going to have a bad time.

A hint; if you find yourself using `.`, you are probably shooting yourself in the foot.

Ruby is a well-sharpened knife. Not everyone should be given a sharp knife though, especially children. And not all jobs need a sharp knife, like buttering toast. So I think it’s good for dull knives to exist as part of your tool belt. If we can only choose one language though, I’d rather it be a nimble, sharp one.

About 10 years ago I had to write a script to reconcile trade entries from various brokers back into our central system.

You are 100% correct on the "100 to 10" ratio on test cases.

PLUS, the ways in which broker files can break due to:

- random carriage returns

- different date formats

- time zones

- etc etc

and regexes become both great and terrifying at the same time.

One pattern I did find useful:

regex + if/then

e.g. if (regex is true) then if (regex2 is true) then