.TH SELF 7
.SH NAME
regex-pronouns \- Regex Pronouns?
.SH AUTHOR
Artyom Bologov
.SH SYNOPSIS
Pronouns are important. They are part of one's identity, after all. But what if one also identifies as a programmer? Regexes as pronoun listing!
.SH TEXT

.P
I have a friend who lists

.UR https://en.pronouns.page/vi/vim
vi/vim
.UE
as vis pronouns.
It's obviously a programmer joke, but quite an illuminating one.
vi/vim pair is conventionally contracted to \fBvi(m)\fP shortcut pattern.
Why not apply that regex-y approach to other pronouns?

.P
The syntax I'm suggesting is not necessarily PCRE or POSIX regex.
I'm rather suggesting a sloppy soup of PCRE, UNIX wildcards, and English.
Kind of like what programmers do when they talk about *nix, GNU/Linux, or jpe?g.

.P
Binary pronouns are a bad example: \fB/h(e|im)/\fP might

.UR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim
sound like home
.UE
,
but it's a pain to type.
Another binary pronoun pair regex that I can come up with is a horrifying \fB/s?her?/\fP.
Not only it looks out of this world, it's also bad at describing the structure of the pronouns.
Is it she? her? sher? he?
So messy.

.P
Other, less widespread pronouns are much better as regex pronouns:

.P
* Aforementioned vi/vim as \fB/vim?/\fP
.P
* \fB/the(y|m)/\fP, \fB/xe(y|m)/\fP
.P
* \fB/its?/\fP
.P
* or the "any pronoun" person as \fB*\fP

.P
Neat, huh?
My pronouns officially are \fB/t?he(y|m)?/\fP now, what are yours?

.P
Update: thanks to many people

.UR https://reddit.com/r/programming/comments/194xlv2/regex_pronouns
on r/programming subreddit
.UE
,
This post now has better regex start/end markers and better expressions for where I had unoptimized syntax.
And to

.UR https://reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/198arxb/regex_pronouns_an_utterly_wrong_application_of
people of r/programminghorror
.UE
,
for productive feedback.


.SH COPYRIGHT

.UR https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
CC-BY 4.0
.UE
 2022-2026 by Artyom Bologov (aartaka,)

.UR https://codeberg.org/aartaka/pages/commit/a91befa
with one commit remixing Claude-generated code
.UE
.
Any and all opinions listed here are my own and not representative of my employers; future, past and present.