this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
121 points (94.8% liked)
Asklemmy
47436 readers
702 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Regular expressions are not that difficult and coders that refuse to learn them because they "look like line noise" are terrible at their jobs.
Easy enough to write. But reading and maintaining? That's the hard part.
I can write a basic regex independently, but as soon as capture groups or positive/negative lookahead or lookbehind start popping up I'm back to the docs every time.
Absolutely, the syntax is difficult to remember, but knowing about concepts like lookaheads etc. is already far beyond what "regex is line noise" coders will ever achieve.
And there’s always regex101.com to help develop and test your expressions!
Level 2 of these people: learn regex and try to parse something non-regular like XML or C++ templates with it.
Same people who did not pay attention and hated the "useless" formal languages lecture in university and who have no clue about proper data structures and algorithms for their problem, just hack together some half-working solution and ship it. Fix bugs with extra if statements instead of solving the real issue. Not writing unit tests.
Soo many people in software development who really should not be there.
Not a coder. But knowing basic regex, makes my life so much easier. Even in things like excel.
Hell, you can even use regex to search your stash in Path of Exile 2.
I've always thought that regular expressions are just specifications for state machines. They aren't that difficult.