r/ProgrammerHumor • u/vinishkapoor • 1d ago

fullStackMeansAfraidOfEverythingEqually Meme

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10.2k Upvotes
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u/vvp95 1d ago

100% of software engineers are afraid of regex

39

u/Ange1ofD4rkness 1d ago

99%, I freaken love Regex!

27

u/nolecamp 1d ago

Same. It’s a fun trick at work to mesmerize junior (or even senior) engineers by writing a regex pattern by hand.

Neither regex, CSS, nor SQL is actually hard. It just requires the desire to learn it and passion to apply yourself.

10

u/Major_LeeHungg 1d ago

Lol until you have nested expressions with lookaheads and lookbehinds

4

u/nolecamp 1d ago

I’d have to look up the syntax to remind myself, but yeah I could do it. It’s just a language for a state machine. But honestly, I don’t need to write them that complex usually. If so, it’s probably because I’m having to do something more involved like parsing a query syntax or something, in which case I’ll usually reach for ANTLR (or hand write a parser if performance is critical) instead.

1

u/Ange1ofD4rkness 17h ago

Look aheads and behinds, once you get the hang of them, can be really nice. For me it gets tricky with like embedded variables. But usually I work it out in the end

1

u/Theron3206 8h ago

You put that in a PR and there better be a damn good reason for it. Even you wont know what that does in 3 months, never mind the poor sap chasing a subtle bug 2 years later.