front matter
preface
Jacques Derrida famously begins his Dissemination with the line: “This (therefore) will not have been a book.”
I am not French, nor am I a famous philosopher. So I will have to set my aim slightly lower. I reckon that what you have in front of you is indeed a book. For 70% of you, apparently, what you will have is a collection of bits on a computer disk or in flash memory which are rendered in something resembling typography and layout, on a screen large or small, for you to read. As much as I retain a bibliophilic delight in actual bound tree pulp stamped with pigments and dyes, all these forms and formats count as a book in contemporary vernacular.
What this will not be, however, is a tutorial (although one is included as an appendix). Nor will it be a reference text. Nor even, in the first measure, an instructional guide. Instead, you have herein a collection of puzzles, ideas, discussions, and a glimpse into the non-mind of AI models.
I hope this work in front of you will accomplish a few things. I hope it will make you think more deeply about regular expressions—a technology which virtually all of the programmers in my readership will have had at least some passing encounters with. While regular expressions provide their own rabbit holes to get lost within, the recently exciting world of AI coding assistants provides a view into an uncanny valley.1