Re:A significant amount of programming is done by superstition
by icebraining on Thursday March 26, 2015 @10:00AM
(#9269631)
I'm not suggesting anything but that you can't build it from first principles. Collecting data and building a theory is not working from first principles, it's just a more structured way of hacking it until it works. You're still liable to have the next website you crawl break your parser.
Re:A significant amount of programming is done by superstition
by sklogic on Thursday March 26, 2015 @12:26PM
(#9270831)
> but that you can't build it from first principles
Do not confuse principles (which are universal, simple and beautiful) with specs (which suck shit a metric ton per second).
> it's just a more structured way of hacking it until it works
You're confusing hacking with cargo cult coding. Hacking until it works is exactly this formal loop: collect the data, build a model, test if it's applicable. Cargo cult is "google for an answer, paste some code from stackoverflow, see if it works". The OP article is about the latter.
And what you seem to suggest, start writing a parser and then experiment with various real-world inputs until you're satisfied, is certainly not a very productive way of doing things.