The Neonify challenge on Hack The Box is a small Sinatra(a Ruby web framework) app, that generates a glowing text of the submitted value:
Another application of Parse, don’t validate. The vulnerability isn’t really about the single-line regex, it’s that the validation doesn’t match the use. If the regex extracted (read: parsed) the valid bit with a group, then passed that through, it would be fine.
Holy cow! What an absolute slog of a read. I’m not an AI model, but I’ll do my best to summarize that link:
[When writing code that works with non-trivial and null-able data types,] use a data structure that makes illegal states unrepresentable. Model your data using the most precise data structure you reasonably can[, …] as quickly as you can. [W]rite functions on the data representation you wish you had, not the data representation you are given. The design process then becomes an exercise in bridging the gap.
There. Hopefully someone out there learned something cool without having to read a 25-minute striptease before the author rushes through their main idea in the span of two bullet points found in the final 25% of the article.
I think your summary is less useful than reading the whole article. Teaching well involves more than just stating a refined idea.
I also think the ideas in the article are worth the 25 minutes.
Teaching also involves stating an idea - which the author forgot to actually do. If it is your article that I am criticizing, I’m sorry for being crass, but make no mistake, the writing is half-assed. An article whose primary piece of advice is to “focus on the datatypes”, shouldn’t avoid the word “datatype” until the 2nd to last header.
Truthfully, the article would be better served by removing the first and 2nd to last section and instead be titled “Why I dislike working with monads in languages that support monads.”
Okay. I don’t really want to keep arguing about this. Your negativity seems entirely unwarranted, so I’m not really sure what you’re trying to achieve. Given the only thing I wanted to say is “this article is worth reading”, I don’t think there’s a productive line for this conversation to go down.
