Timeline for Is it a must for every programmer to learn regular expressions?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 13, 2012 at 20:21 | comment | added | Ben Lee |
@NimChimpsky, I am a full-time web programmer and linux system administrator. It probably doesn't surprise you that I use regexes frequently in my web development (a domain that regex typically excels at), but I also use regex all the time in system administration. I can't imagine putting together many effective greps or quick-fix-scripts without regular expressions.
|
|
| Feb 11, 2012 at 9:01 | comment | added | NimChimpsky | @quanticle a magic number ? I am a java dev who does a fair bit of sys admin, like I said I haven't used one for about 5 years. I know they are there, and if such a need arises as yours (very obscure) I will use one. | |
| Feb 10, 2012 at 23:01 | comment | added | quanticle | @NimChimpsky Regexps work everywhere. IDEs and refactoring tools only work for specific languages. For example, will your refactoring tool allow me to go through all of my templates and find/delete a string that looks like a phone number (sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/…)? | |
| Feb 9, 2012 at 7:48 | comment | added | NimChimpsky | @quanticle if you finding and replacing across large chunks of code you are doing it wrong. Doesn't your ide support refactoring ? I use eclipse and it does. | |
| Feb 9, 2012 at 6:20 | comment | added | jmoreno | @Dunk he's not saying that it is a large efficiency gain, over the life of a project, but rather that it can be a large gain over a small time period. I have also done refactoring where there were hundreds, even thousands, of changes in dozens of files. Over the life of the project the hours saved are insignificant, but I surely didn't want to take the hours or days it would have taken to do the same changes by hand. Modern IDE's can do some of this for you without you writing a regex, butsometimes it can't (rewiring a common assigment pattern for instance). | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 23:16 | comment | added | Dunk | @quanticle-Since typing in the code and changing code takes about 0.01% of the time in developing software (at most), I really don't see any efficiency gains that you are claiming simply because you use regular expressions for find and replace. Typing in the code is the easy part. | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 22:37 | comment | added | quanticle | I do manipulate source code with regular expressions. Refactoring large chunks of code by hand is tedious and error-prone. Using an editor that supports regular expression find and replace (hint: pretty much every editor supports regexp find and replace) makes refactoring much much easier. | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 21:21 | comment | added | NimChimpsky | @quanticle that doesn't make any sense. You actually manipulate your source code with regular expressions ? That sounds like an absolute nightmare. Regular expressions are part of your code and your code interacts with domain specific data. | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 20:35 | comment | added | quanticle | Lots of text is always domain specific. You are a programmer after all. Text (in the form of source code) is your domain. Efficiently manipulating text with regular expressions makes you a more efficient programmer. | |
| Feb 8, 2012 at 20:25 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Xyz | ||
| Feb 8, 2012 at 17:04 | history | answered | NimChimpsky | CC BY-SA 3.0 |