this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Regular expressions are not that difficult and coders that refuse to learn them because they "look like line noise" are terrible at their jobs.
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!
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.
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.
Easy enough to write. But reading and maintaining? That's the hard part.
I've always thought that regular expressions are just specifications for state machines. They aren't that difficult.