Stop writing CLI validation. Parse it right the first time

(hackers.pub)

203 points dahlia | 2 comments | 06 Sep 25 18:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source

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yakshaving_jgt ◴[06 Sep 25 21:46 UTC] No.45153163[source]▶

I've noticed that many programmers believe that parsing is some niche thing that the average programmer likely won't need to contend with, and that it's only applicable in a few specific low-level cases, in which you'll need to reach for a parser combinator library, etc.

But this is wrong. Programmers should be writing parsers all the time!

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1. WJW ◴[06 Sep 25 22:08 UTC] No.45153317[source]▶

>>45153163 #

Last week my primary task was writing a github action that needed to log in to Heroku and push the current code on main and development branches to the production and staging environments respectively. The week before that, I wrote some code to make sure the type the object was included in the filters passed to an API call.

Don't get me wrong, I actually love writing parsers. It's just not required all that often in my day-to-day work. 99% of the time when I need to write a parser myself it's for and Advent of Code problem, usually I just import whatever JSON or YAML parser is provided for the platform and go from there.

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2. yakshaving_jgt ◴[06 Sep 25 22:17 UTC] No.45153397[source]▶

>>45153317 (TP) #

Do you not write validation? Or handle user input? Or handle server responses? Surely there’s some data processing somewhere.

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