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“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
He wasn't wrong, and it's a larger issue than politics. 
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I visited it and gave you an upvote to go with your other 77 
my magnum opus (PCK) got crap here. But it does have 20 stars on github 
Still, my most popular articles are dwarfed by yours in terms of popularity. Geez
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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It is a usual case... people love those kind of "XXX for beginners" and there is a lot of people with a lot of followers that just bring crappy articles to heaven...
But that's the power of the masses
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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<snicker> Guilty, I would never read an article on regex (or xml) as they are not tools I would use unless forced to. Lists on the other hand I consider to be a major part of my toolbox. I think it comes down to relevance.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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That's fair. However, if you ever have to write a parser, you'll need a tokenizer, and those run on finite state machines. You don't *need* to use regex to create them (in fact, my parser construction kit, PCK lets you define them using an EBNF variant if you want) but one way or another you need a declarative way to describe a state machine that can be used for pattern matching if you're going to be tokenizing.
Interestingly enough, state machines like this don't have to be limited to text. You could in theory use them to do pattern matching over collections of objects for example.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Way 148 may startle French? (5)
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A feast of recognition 
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Hmm, about a year ago I had a request to "bring in all the data". My boss, of course, asked if it could be done by the end of the year.
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It does, and your post had me drooling even before I hit the cartoon. You are conditioned to give a time, but that's not your only option.
There's a simple solution if you need to give an estimate when the amount of work is unknown; give the client an (unused, clean) book with sudoko puzzles and ask them to estimate the time required to finish the book. With an error-margin of no more than a week. You can't guarantee the enddate of a trip to the day if the way of transportation is an unknown.
That's what most estimates are; guesses, usually biased on the cheap side to beat the competition. Often a manager betting on their devs working free overtime, which often works.
Needless to say I do not estimate, I leave that to the booky's. FWIW, I'm betting on the brown horse 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Yep
They call me different but the truth is they're all the same!
JaxCoder.com
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I was once in a company that had a project they were outsourcing to Romania.
The company had three CEO's and they went to Romania for a week to discuss the project.
When they came back one of those guys asked me, can you make an estimate for the project?
It went something like this:
Manager: Can you make an estimate for the project?
Me: You've been there for a week, aren't they supposed to give you an estimate?
Manager: They did, but I don't trust it.
Me: Alright... So how many people will be working on it?
Manager: I don't know.
Me: Then I'm going with their estimate. Also HOW CAN YOU GO THERE A WEEK AND NOT KNOW!?
Manager: It didn't come up, but I want you to make an assumption and make an estimate.
Me: Alright, I'm assuming their estimate is good.
Manager, getting annoyed: No, just assume three developers and make a new estimate.
Me: I'm assuming it will take a year.
Manager: NO! AN EDUCATED ESTIMATE!
Me: How in the hell can I make an educated estimate if they can't and I have to assume everything?
Manager: I just trust you a lot more than then.
Me, counting X functionalities from a spreadsheet: X weeks.
Manager: X weeks, that sounds reasonable, so it's as I thought, their estimate is far too optimistic.
One of the weirdest conversations in my life 
Ultimately, it turned out we got one "senior" developer and a project manager that somehow needed 20 hours a week to manage that one developer.
After the first code they send us it was as I feared, their senior was a junior, or at least someone who didn't know jack sh*t.
I rang some alarm bells, but I was tasked to discuss it with them.
Ultimately, I said f*** it, I found another job and that project failed miserably.
It cost them a lot of money and never even went into production.
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Code I've been working on for 2 days with 3 rewrites is still not working and the code looks like garbage because half of it is experimentation and console diagnostic spew
*sigh*
I have no idea how to transform a state machine into a regular expression apparently.
I've come very close countless times in the past few days, where it works with some expressions but not others.
mathematically it is guaranteed to be possible. so far it's proving as difficult to learn as building a parser generator. =(
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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A bit of Mud to cheer you up: Quote: Wrong or right
But they all know Dyna is Dynamite
And they're right.
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If it's of any comfort, neither do I.
And I believe I can speak for most of us. 
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It's a cool feature though because if i can do it, it means i can reconstitute things like Gold Parser's compiled grammar files back into their text representation including the regex expressions it uses for terminals
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Quote: console diagnostic spew
Eww.
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yeah i know, but it's expedient and this code will be rewritten once it's working
(Mostly Harmless)
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Yet another message that the filter did not like. Does it know something about you that we don't?
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Quote: Does it know something about you that we don't?
I don't think so!  It's probably the link that it doesn't like. It seems to flag all messages with embedded links. That is understandable.
modified 23-Nov-19 10:10am.
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It's not just the link, since lots of messages have links in them. There just seems to be something about your account that makes it nervous. As Matthew pointed out, this should clear itself up in time.
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Quote: this should clear itself up in time
Well, I'll be patient.
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romanesco broccoli[^] as well
"Five fruits and vegetables a day? What a joke!
Personally, after the third watermelon, I'm full."
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