14 January 2008 by John.

Here are a few realizations that helped me the most when I was learning regular expressions.

1. Regular expressions aren’t trivial. If you think they’re trivial, but you can’t get them to work, then you feel stupid. They’re not trivial, but they’re not that hard either. They just take some study.

2. Regular expressions are not command line wild cards. They contain some of the same symbols but they don’t mean the same thing. They’re just similar enough to cause confusion.

3. Regular expressions are a little programming language.Regular expressions are usually contained inside another programming language, like JavaScript or PowerShell. Think of the expressions as little bits of a foreign language, like a French quotation inside English prose. Don’t expect rules from the outside language to have any relation to the rules inside, no more than you’d expect English grammar to apply inside that French quote.

4. Character classes are a little sub-language within regular expressions. Character classes are their own little world. Once you realize that and don’t expect the usual rules for regular expressions outside character classes to apply, you can see that they’re not very complicated, just different. Failure to realize that they are different is a major source of bugs.

Once you’re ready to dive into regular expressions, read Jeffrey Friedl’s book. It’s by far the best book on the subject. Read the first few chapters carefully, but then flip the pages quickly when he goes off into NFA engines and all that.

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14 January 2008 by John.

Suppose I asked where you want to eat lunch. Then I told you I was about to flip a coin and asked again where you want to eat lunch. Would your answer change? Probably not, but sometimes the introduction of irrelevant uncertainty does change our behavior.

In a dose-finding trial, it is often the case that a particular observation has no immediate importance to decision making. Suppose Mr. Smith’s outcome is unknown. We calculate what the next dose will be if he responds to treatment and what it will be if he does not respond. If both doses are the same, why wait to know his outcome before continuing? Some people accept this reasoning immediately, while others are quite resistant.

Not only may a patient’s outcome be irrelevant, the outcome of an entire clinical trial may be irrelevant. I heard of a conversation with a drug company where a consultant asked what the company would do if their trial were successful. He then asked what they would do if it were not successful. Both answers were the same. He then asked why do the trial at all, but his question fell on deaf ears.

While it is irrational to wait to resolve irrelevant uncertainty, it is a human tendency. For example, businesses may delay a decision on some action pending the outcome of a presidential election, even if they would take the same action regardless which candidate won. I see how silly this is when other people do it, but it’s not too hard for me to think of analogous situations where I act the same way.

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