So a teammate and I were looking at some code another person wrote, trying to make some small changes. The code dynamically builds a regex based off a config file, which is used to validate some file names. So to add a new, valid report, you update the .cfg, and the new regex is created. We were debugging, and logging stuff to see what was going on. we got to the regex...
My teammate has widescreen monitor...
A third person came by and said:
If your regex does not fit on a single screen, it's too long.
There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors