Re:Regular Expressions – Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind
by wruza on Friday March 16, 2018 @10:58AM
(#16601089)
No offense taken. But I'm not sure if this is objective or an another point of view. I do not think in terms of strings; with regex I actually describe what syntax my writing has and use that for conversion. Obviously, I cannot manage random mixed-style codes or entire grammar that way (though some flexibility exists). But for a homogeneous style it is pretty simple -- imo simpler than getting used to yet another IDE with its can and cannot-s.
Since I may use 2-3 [non-web] languages at the same time, viable IDE options may go down to zero. I like how regex and other vim-specific features empower my typing enough to not use what constrains me in my toolset.
Look, I used to write web application in the 1990's with vim on computers with video cards that didn't have X drivers for them. I'm well versed in regular expressions, having used maybe a dozen flavors of them over the last 20 years. Being snooty about how useful regular expression should be (in your opinion) to the work of every other programmer out there isn't going to change the experiences of those others. I maintain that for web development there are quite often uses, but for scientific software (which is what I do), embedded, non-web based CRUD/LoB, and many other applications - it's just not what it used to be.
EDIT: turns out I was mixing up the tone of your comment with that of bmn__ down below so I replied more belligerent than your comment warrented - no offense, I'm just going to leave it up regardless.