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Practice, my friend. You might have developed a systematic methodology for quickly learning and internalising (many) other things. (Kudos.) But sometimes it j

Practice, my friend. You might have developed a systematic methodology for quickly learning and internalising (many) other things. (Kudos.) But sometimes it just comes down to wrote practice and repetition; time and effort might be key here for your mastery of this subject.

KronosNull 7y ago
The problem I have with learning regex is similar to the above. It's easy enough to (re)learn when you need it and it doesn't come up often enough for me to consider actually learning it as being useful.
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
To add to that, regex mojo has just kind of built up in my head over years. It's not something a topic I was able to study, learn, and retain (well). Every time I stumble onto a regex use case I need to understand & don't, I level up at that time, and that's always been totally fine. A few months ago I needed to add a regex for validating IPv4 addresses that were in a non-standard format. I had to do a little research, then I wrote & tested it, and promptly forgot 90% of what I had just learned.
igivanov 7y ago
>time and effort might be key here for your mastery of this subject. It doesn't have to be this way. If most programming languages were designed like regular expressions they would be unusable. I can spend a year w/o writing a single line of Pascal or C++ and then it would come back immediately. I occasionally found regular expressions useful in my work, but only a couple of times could justify spending time on learning a little bit of it only to forget the next day. In a few other cases I simply googled a solution and used w/o understanding it. Most often I just write code instead, it is verbose but at least it's clear what it does.
- hackbinary 7y ago
  I suppose what I'm trying to say is that from personal and anecdotal experience I got 97% in a first year calculus course. I went in with a marginally good algebra result, but I resolved to learn the shit out of everything that came my way. I systemised as much as I could, but there was a lot of write practice when it came to learning trigonomic idendities and transidnetal functions. And not just the normal ones; I mean all of them ... both the inverserse and hyperbolic identities. I did all of the problems and got extra ones. In short, I knew the material backwards and forwards; I finished hour long exams in 20 minutes, and was usually the first or second person to leave. What I am trying to say is that REGEX is similar to calculas and in my view requires significant focus and practice to master. Or you can muddle your way through it when you have to.

KronosNull 7y ago

The problem I have with learning regex is similar to the above. It's easy enough to (re)learn when you need it and it doesn't come up often enough for me to consider actually learning it as being useful.

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

To add to that, regex mojo has just kind of built up in my head over years. It's not something a topic I was able to study, learn, and retain (well). Every time I stumble onto a regex use case I need to understand & don't, I level up at that time, and that's always been totally fine. A few months ago I needed to add a regex for validating IPv4 addresses that were in a non-standard format. I had to do a little research, then I wrote & tested it, and promptly forgot 90% of what I had just learned.

igivanov 7y ago

>time and effort might be key here for your mastery of this subject. It doesn't have to be this way. If most programming languages were designed like regular expressions they would be unusable. I can spend a year w/o writing a single line of Pascal or C++ and then it would come back immediately. I occasionally found regular expressions useful in my work, but only a couple of times could justify spending time on learning a little bit of it only to forget the next day. In a few other cases I simply googled a solution and used w/o understanding it. Most often I just write code instead, it is verbose but at least it's clear what it does.

hackbinary 7y ago
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that from personal and anecdotal experience I got 97% in a first year calculus course. I went in with a marginally good algebra result, but I resolved to learn the shit out of everything that came my way. I systemised as much as I could, but there was a lot of write practice when it came to learning trigonomic idendities and transidnetal functions. And not just the normal ones; I mean all of them ... both the inverserse and hyperbolic identities. I did all of the problems and got extra ones. In short, I knew the material backwards and forwards; I finished hour long exams in 20 minutes, and was usually the first or second person to leave. What I am trying to say is that REGEX is similar to calculas and in my view requires significant focus and practice to master. Or you can muddle your way through it when you have to.