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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

That's a stupid reply. Regular expressions are very useful.

Regular expressions are useful, but on a much smaller set of problems than people typically use them for.

For example Chrome's script skipper in the debug tools completely unnecessarily uses regexes rather than a simple list of 'contains'.

It's definitely one of the worst "everything's a nail" hammers a lot of programmers wield. And quite often they've been holding it upside down for years without even realizing it.

> For example Chrome's script skipper in the debug tools completely unnecessarily uses regexes rather than a simple list of 'contains'.

That is your example of overkill? More like, exactly the sort of scenario where you'd want to be able to specify a regexp.

Another situation where regexes are possibly abused - syntax highlighting. Yes, there are a lot of languages where you can sanely highlight /most/ code with regexes, but there's a non-zero number where you need a little more context, such as that provided by an AST (which would also help with autocompletion anyway if the highlighting is being done in the context of an editor).

I'm consistently infuriated every time a search box in a GUI lacks regex support (which is very nearly all of the time).

Maybe the next fight on HN about the interview process should be whether we ought to expect the candidate to know about regexps.

I know them, so of course every good developer should know them. (My proof: I am a good developer, and I know them, therefore good developers should know them!)

(NB: In case it's not obvious this comment is slightly tongue-in-cheek.)

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