Any idea how elitist this sounds? It's not at all "just like" an article about Dijkstra, Ruby on Rails or mathematics or whatever.
Usually such articles are praised on how well-written they are, even allowing for people not familiar with the background getting the gist, somewhat.
> Or do people seeing stuff like "^[ab](foo)^[k])/i complain that:
> "that pretty much explains why people have a hard time "getting" computer science theory. Gibberish.Goobeltygook$"?
> There a logic behind regular expressions, and there's a logic behind chord/interval notation. And the second is a lot easier, too, and it's used because it's succint and it works.
That's a very good example, because IMO it demonstrates my point. If anyone would have written an article like that about regular expressions, written in the same way, with:
Regexes peppered inline throughout each sentence, repeatedly mentioning how this is probably the most basic stuff ever--up to the point of actually apologizing for stooping down to the level of what must probably be "regex theory 101". Then someone would have remarked "that pretty much explains why people have a hard time 'getting' regular expressions. Gibberish. Goobeltygook", then nobody would have disagreed with them. Because everybody knows that a badly written article about regexes very quickly becomes to look like unreadable gibberish.
And in case you didn't catch that, this article actually apologizes for "probably being jazz theory 101". What? Have you ever seen a comp.sci/math article being apologetic about saying
"I know this is probably graph theory 101, but we define a graph as an ordered pair G = (V, E) comprising a set V of vertices or nodes together with a set E of edges or lines ..."
Of course not! It is considered good style to repeat the basics, and in fact IMO, I consider it bad style to be apologetic about it (because it's condescending to that part of your audience that made good use of the quick refresher).
Everybody knows that regexes can quickly look like unreadable gooblygook, even if you're familiar with them, and any article that wants to discuss something fundamental about regexes, is going to have to take some special care to not make it look as such. In some sense, same goes for set theory or mathematical formulae in general.
That still doesn't mean the hypothetical regex article would be so much clearer to the layman, but it would seem much more approachable, in some sense.
I thought I knew some very rudimentary things about music theory, but apparently not enough to make the leap to "get" and string together what this guy is talking about in pure jargon (and believe me I spent more than the "10 minutes" everybody says it would take). To me, that tells me the article is simply badly written. A similar exposition about monads in functional programming, is more like what I'd expect in a 1-on-1 comment thread (when it's perfectly ok to use as much jargon to succinctly get your point across) than a blog article intended for the general public (when regardless how obvious or simple, it always pays to step down and explain from basics, even if only to reinforce the audience that already knows them you're talking about the same things).
In fact, the only other computer science topic I've seen this sort of attitude, is the security/exploit/disclosure/hacking scene. That's where people routinely bash on eachother for repeating the basics and that "this is nothing new" because hacker X already did sploit Y in 2005 which was kinda similar (regardless that writing/warning about it again is a good thing).