My ARM goes to 11

Beautifully phrased.

Damn you for posting something insightful after I've commented elsewhere.

While this is more true in Appalachia, correlation does not equal causation.

Except that in this case I'm already making software for software development, so it actually makes sense.

I would fully expect to be working for the company that's building the software development machines, mostly since that's what I already do.

I do take your point, but the problem is that there are lots of people with non-transferable skills because they're not really skills. That's generally not true in any field that actually requires an education. (And no, business school and anthropology do not count as an education.)

I read that as "We cannot be bothered to get a proper education and assume there will be well paid jobs for us as soon as we leave high school". But I'm sure it's not what you meant.

What did you mean?

... if you never studied history.

I'm pretty sure we heard the same tripe at every phase of every innovation since the dawn of technology.

Fortunately the revolution will not be televised.

Amusingly, I used to work in a foundry and I'm currently a software developer. (Employer keeps trying to call me an engineer, but I call it alchemy.)

I think you over estimate the time or skill required to master steel production. You could have a high-schooler trained to do it inside a year.

Such a shame that the American people allow the university (and medical) systems to hold them hostage instead of allowing the whole country to move into the 20th century.

100% agreed.

Regular expressions are but one tool, but for far too many people it's a hammer and every problem is a nail.

In my experience there is something close to a 10/1 ratio between gratuitous pointless uses of regular expressions and effective useful ones.

My favorite abuse case is where no real wildcarding is done and all they really want to know is, "does this string contain this substring". I find extreme cases in bad perl.

I found a build script that was attempting to prepare localization templates, it would build a regular expression for each variable it was trying to replace (with no real wildcarding of course) and then evaluate each line in the template with every expression. Since the number of lines in the template were directly proportional to the number of variables this was n^2 evaluations.

I replaced this with a simple linear approach where a look up table with all the translations are read into a lookup table in memory and each line of the template can be scanned character by character.

The resulting script went from O(n^2) with regular expressions to O(n) with simple character comparisons, our problem input went from 20 minutes to process to less than a second, 1200 times faster.

Regular expressions are very powerful, but they are no substitute for thinking or datastructures or algorithms.

Don't teach new programmers regular expressions, teach them to think. Teach them how to analyse algorithms. Teach them how to build datastructures.

Then, once you've done all that, then you can teach them regular expressions, but make sure they know what they're doing. (And it won't work, they'll immediately start abusing them, happens every time.)

Everyone down to the pub. I'm buying.

I just looked out the window... there's a freaky old guy out there with a funky looking Delorean looking very confused.

Regular expressions are incredibly powerful and useful, if you know how to use them and how to not abuse them.

Much like welding torches.

Incense and windchimes... can we patent this?