Comments on: Computer classes should teach regular expressions to kids

By: Jim Davison

Jim Davison — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:57:00 +0000

I’m not sure there’s a “user friendly” solution to providing a tool set that allows matching of any/all arbitrary possible language patterns.

By: Andy Reilly

Andy Reilly — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 05:26:00 +0000

cservant: Sadly they weren’t students. One is a full time “Senior Systems Analyst” and the other was a temp DB analyst. I refuse to call here a “Senior Systems Analyst” because she knows zip about systems. She’s a very basic DB admin who only knows a very narrow set of MS SQL Server.

By: soupisgoodfood

soupisgoodfood — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 03:48:00 +0000

Hard to tell if you’re joking. Pretty much none of them will remember how to do a regex after a week, even of the few that will understand it. Not unless you make it as much a part of the curriculum as basic language skills. Regex is a true nerd tool — I’m fairly smart (at least enough to understand software development), yet I still have to look up regex or use one of those handy apps on the odd occasions I need to write one properly, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. There is nothing intuitive about it’s syntax. Why not force spaghetti Pearl and Python on them while you’re at it.

If you want to see which kids are interested in programming, there are better ways to start. Forcing regex in a basic high-school level computer science class is probably enough to put many talented kids off programming for life.

You do bring up a good point, though. Maybe we should stop teaching them PowerPoint — leave that for the MBA classes.

By: gjtorikian

gjtorikian — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 19:24:00 +0000

Completely agree. Frankly I’ve never been able to think in terms of “lookaround / negative lookaround”–I can’t train my brain that way–but maybe, with these kids, there’s hope…!

By: Guest

Guest — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:04:00 +0000

Of course there are unreadable and overcomplex uses of regexp, as with every other technology. But just as well there are tasks for which they are the optimal tool, and “optimal” here is more of a fact than a matter of opinion.

By: cservant

cservant — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:22:00 +0000

This probably won’t be read but, meh.

1) Yes. You can get away without knowing regexp, and do your job fine on any general DB situations. BUT from my view there’s development away from relationship databases and to systems like Cassandra. Regular Expression thus are becoming more important. Not knowing about them shows what type of analyst you are. Not saying you have to be good with them, at minimal, I’m expecting you to know what they are.

2) I do. It still saddens me. If it’s up to me, in a small company, you won’t get hired or you’re only here in a temporary basis. If we’re thinking about hiring one, my argument would be hiring someone that knows jack will cost less plus a focus on teamenship evaluations will be less stress on the team. If it’s a large company, HR and I will be at odds–what else is new?

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 02:14:00 +0000

You can dissect humor, but much like a frog, it tends to die in the process.

By: invictus

invictus — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 02:06:00 +0000

Yes, RLY. Because you might note there was no mention of the task being repeated in the original comment, and I’m sure we all know people who gleefully ignore the cost:benefit considerations if it lets them justify playing with the $SHINY while getting paid.

By: invictus

invictus — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 02:04:00 +0000

Actually, if people weren’t paying attention to the cost/benefit angle, we’d all be extinct. You’ve got your causal relationship exactly backwards.

By: knappa

knappa — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 01:31:00 +0000

to name just three reasons it is a nightmare to maintain.

I don’t think that we are talking about use in professionally maintained code here. Something more like a couple of lines which only run once – ever – and are tossed.

By: Julian M Bucknall

Julian M Bucknall — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 01:21:00 +0000

I’d have to say this comment pwns the rest.

By: zen

zen — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 01:01:00 +0000

which will then be re-couped in 6 report runs and forever there after be ‘bonus’ time.

how is time invested in automating a process EVER seen as a bad thing??

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:09:00 +0000

Simmer down.

By: Guest

Guest — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 23:25:00 +0000

… especially true for lookarounds, which in terms of formal languages are not regular at all. I often found that when I seemed to need those, the problem is better solved by not squeezing it into a single expression.

By: Textuality

Textuality — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:49:00 +0000

Thanks all, I’ll have a look at those.

By: Carl Witthoft

Carl Witthoft — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:48:00 +0000

I believe there’s a world-famous StackOverflow on that… … Got it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

By: Carl Witthoft

Carl Witthoft — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:45:00 +0000

RLY? It was a boring half-hour job that has to be repeated every week. Or day. There’s a Rule of 10s: Do it once by hand; if you need it 10 times, get a script; if you need it 100 times write compiled code. (or thereabouts)

By: Mitchell Glaser

Mitchell Glaser — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:41:00 +0000

Thanks for the link, I didn’t know that you could comment Regex in a few languages.

By: Daemonworks

Daemonworks — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:21:00 +0000

Can we teach them critical thinking first?

By: spacedmonkey

spacedmonkey — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Seeing as we still fail to teach most kids even basic science literacy before they get out of high school (or college, for that matter) I think we have more pressing concerns than regular expressions.

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Gawd, I wasn’t implying any contradiction or “tension”. Like any other tool, it has its right and wrong uses.

Relax, Francis… the link I provided explains itself. Sheesh, step away from the computer, go take a walk in a park or something…

By: Matthew Daly

Matthew Daly — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:44:00 +0000

About that. However, this was a weekly job, so after six weeks it resulted in a net saving of time, not to mention the fact that the function I wrote was a lot more accurate and reliable than doing it manually.

By: Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:43:00 +0000

Also, fifth grade would be a good time to introduce statistics, which rely on not much more than arithmetic. The use of calculus to teach stats seems to be nothing but a way to create an elite class of statisticians. In fact, many of them live a life like George Jetson, punching the same button a few times a day for 20 years. And anyone that retained all that calculus longer than was needed to pass the midterm and final is going to be like Dustin Hoffman in “Rainman.”

By: Dave Pease

Dave Pease — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:37:00 +0000

think of it as extremely flexible search and replace, for starters. lots of word processors have this ability, for example, but many people don’t even know to look for it and instead do a significant amount of shovelwork in a file to change a syntax or something else. Regex will open your mind to the possibilities of being lazy and saving a load of time through automation.

I regexped a lot of what I had to do the rest of the day, so I’m off to play Borderlands 2 now.

By: Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:32:00 +0000

If people weren’t willing to disregard the cost/benefit angle now and then we’d all be living in caves eating dirt.
Keep in mind that previous versions of Excel required substantial tinkering to accomplish things like comparing two lists.

By: EvilTerran

EvilTerran — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:31:00 +0000

Regular expressions are no more of an abomination than arithmetic. They’re both systems of fairly-arbitrary symbols that have specific, formal, actually-pretty-simple when-you-get-down-to-it meanings. People just don’t tend to be as familiar with the meaning of “|” as that of “+”.

Hell, I’d say regular expressions are actually simpler than arithmetic. In a technical sense, at least — I’m pretty sure you could define an embedding of formal regex in formal arithmetic, but not vice-versa.

By: coop

coop — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:30:00 +0000

Also, see the title text:

http://xkcd.com/224/

By: wysinwyg

wysinwyg — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:27:00 +0000

Yes! This drives me crazy. Fallout 3 and Bioshock have the same problem. Especially when I think of all the fun little problems I’ve done on job interviews; it wouldn’t exactly be hard to find real CS challenges to work into games like Deus Ex and similar.

By: invictus

invictus — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:18:00 +0000

…after spending three hours on coding the solution to the half-hour job?

By: wysinwyg

wysinwyg — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:18:00 +0000

1. You can do a whole lot with SQL without knowing regular expressions. I can’t even think of any routine DB admin tasks that require regexp. Now, calling yourself a “DB analyst” without knowing regexp…that’s a bit of a stretch, admittedly.
2. You apparently don’t have too much experience with developers educated within the Microsoft ecosystem. Andy’s account sounds about right.