Hacker News Reader

Comment by greydius | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy the layman argument. Programmers might not be mathematicians or computer scientists, but they should be professionals and held to the same standards as professionals in other fields. For example, a mechanical engineer doesn't use a "laymen" definition of tensile strength when choosing materials for a design.

View on HN

No, but he probably does use layman's terms when describing molecular lattices and electron shells. If he ever does.

The point here is that users of (colloquial) regular expressions, however professional they are or aren't, are just engaging with the surface of a deeper set of mathematical principles that require greater nuances of meaning to discuss than their applications do.

I basically agree, but I would say that a slightly deeper understanding of regular expressions is a really useful thing to know for basically all professional programmers. If for no other reason they can recognize the "pathological" cases where backtracking implementations (i.e. almost all modern regex implementations) would need until the heat death of the universe to evaluate.

Programmers might not be mathematicians or computer scientists, but they should be professionals

What? No. Many programmers out there are just working on fun projects in their spare time. I'm sure there exist some aerospace engineers doing that, but it's not many. I don't see why your average bedroom open source programmer should be treated like an aerospace engineer.

Programmers have more freedom from the constraints of reality than mechanical or civil engineers.

What the fuck are you talking about? Those aren't even remotely the same thing at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com