As Chinese is to English, Regular Expressions are to…

Cathy made an interesting comment to me recently. We were talking about reading and she was complaining that reading an English book took days compared to hours for a Chinese one of the same length.

I was thinking about this. It seems like is because Chinese is much more information dense language. There are tens of thousands of characters to learn, however once each is known the brain can easily scan and read it. However with English there seems to be much more decoding happening. Words are formed from letters which means that the brain has to recognise each letter in turn. Or at least enough to make a sensible guess.

It occurred to me this is somewhat like Regular Expressions. Regex is notoriously difficult to master, and yet once it is offers a powerful, concise way to express what could take many lines of conventional code.

I don’t think there is a lesson here, but I do find it interesting that there are a couple of approaches to both reading and programming with different advantages. One offers a low barrier to entry but repeatedly extracts a cost in efficiency, the other offers more prohibitive learning curve, but yields high gains once the threshold is reached.

I really love Regex, maybe I should learn Chinese so I can read more quickly.

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