From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2004-11-19T03:36:39+09:00
Subject: Re: About Regular Expressions

On Nov 18, 2004, at 9:44 AM, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:

> My opinion is this: Regexp's are for CS-heads --those who really love
> programming for its it's own sake. Regexp are about as terse and 
> cryptic as
> one can get, and thus have a steep learning curve.

My experience has been the opposite.

At my wife's company, they spend a significant portion of everyday 
importing raw text reports from their database into Excel for various 
uses.  Some of the reports do not go into Excel well at all.  A large 
chunk of most employee's day is spent cleaning up these reports, by 
hand.  (I'm considering one of these reports for a future Ruby Quiz, if 
that gives you any idea how wonky they can be.)

When my wife came to me for help and showed me the problem, the 
solution turned out to be simple.  I helped her download a simple text 
editor with Regular Expression search and replace, over the phone.  
That evening, I taught her a useful subset of Regular Expression and 
together we built and printed a "cheat sheet" she could take to work 
with her.

My wife is no programmer.  She's a slightly above average computer 
user.  She's great with Excel and can record macros, but she would 
never thing of editing one, by way of example.  It literally took me 
about three hours to get her doing useful things with Regular 
Expression.  Today, she's the wizard at her company they all come to 
for help.  She's easily the most productive employee they have, when it 
comes to any kind of reporting work.

I'm not trying to imply anything about you or your beliefs.  I'm just 
saying that some people don't seem to have too much trouble with them.  
I know my wife still keeps that cheat sheet right next to her computer. 
  Perhaps a trick like that would be of some use to you or other folks 
who struggle with Regular Expression.

James Edward Gray II