Timeline for Is it a must for every programmer to learn regular expressions?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 4, 2015 at 19:36 | comment | added | Jirka Hanika | @Andrea - There is also a huge difference between "mathematician's REs" and "programmer's RE's". A mathematician can prove that palindromes do not form a regular language. A programmer can write a RE to match them. | |
| Aug 17, 2012 at 20:02 | history | edited | ahsteele | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
grammar and clarity
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| Aug 17, 2012 at 13:09 | comment | added | KChaloux | We were introduced to regular expressions along with BASH scripting for a Unix class. Considering the general consensus in the comments, it's probably not too out there to expect a CS grad to have some exposure to them. Granted, I didn't really start using them frequently until I picked up Ruby. | |
| Aug 16, 2012 at 8:50 | comment | added | Steven Oxley | I would go further than to say "most developers with [sic] learn them sooner or later" and say that most developers should learn them as soon as possible. They come in handy so often and are so useful in many different situations that the time investment will be rewarded very quickly. | |
| Mar 26, 2012 at 16:22 | vote | accept | user | ||
| Feb 28, 2012 at 4:28 | comment | added | Jason Lewis | One would assume any CS grad would be familiar with pushdown automata; regexes are typically the canonical example. Problem? | |
| Feb 13, 2012 at 20:06 | comment | added | Ben Lee | @AdamJaskiewicz, that's true (practical regexes are not always taught in a formal CS curriculum), but people coming out of these probably have an easier time picking them up practically, and more importantly, people with a formal background probably have a deeper and/or more intuitive idea of what kind of problems are possible/plausible/appropriate for regex and the efficiency profiles of using regex. In other words, the formal training isn't useless in practice. | |
| Feb 9, 2012 at 3:07 | comment | added | Lukasz Madon | what do you mean by knowing? knowing what they can't and can do? pros and cons? hope that digging further not include questions like e-mail validation stackoverflow.com/questions/201323/… | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 21:25 | comment | added | Adam Jaskiewicz | @Andrea, when I was in university (BS in Computer Science) regular expressions were indeed covered when learning about grammars and automata. However, it was only the formal concept that was covered, not applications. We didn't learn the POSIX or Perl-compatible regular expression syntax, or how to use them in our coding. We learned how to draw a state diagram of a finite-state automaton, write that as a regular expression, etc. Greek letters were involved, not grep and text files. | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 21:05 | comment | added | Andrea | I am a mathematician, so I have no formal background in computer science, but I would have thought that regexes were actually taught in college courses, while discuting grammars, parsers, automatas and whatnot. I actually expected that someone fresh out of college would have a better knowledge that an experienced programmer with no CS studies. :-/ | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 20:44 | comment | added | eykanal | Someone fresh out of school, with only an education knowledge of coding, wouldn't know them. Someone who has actually programmed for kicks while in college would at the very least be aware of their existence. Asking about them in an interview is a pretty good way of weeding out the former. | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 20:25 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Xyz | ||
| Feb 8, 2012 at 18:19 | comment | added | ptyx | Agreed with comments above - I would not expect someone fresh out of school to necessarily know regular expressions. But I might still ask. | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 17:03 | comment | added | FrustratedWithFormsDesigner | @SK-logic: Depends on the school. We all had a mandatory course in 2nd year that made pretty heavy use of regular expressions (I admit, that's where I got hooked on them ;) ). And more than a few senior-level courses brought them up again, though never quite as intensely. | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 16:57 | comment | added | SK-logic | I agree, it is a good question for any experienced developer. But asking a fresh graduate with no working experience about them is probably slightly unfair - unless they really wanted to filter out applicants with no practical programming experience at all. | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 16:51 | history | answered | ptyx | CC BY-SA 3.0 |