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> if I wanted to do a simple find-and-replace on my 2021 M1, I'd have to use something like grep (a tool originally written by Ken Thompson in 1973—a half cent
by gyomu 3y ago
> if I wanted to do a simple find-and-replace on my 2021 M1, I'd have to use something like grep (a tool originally written by Ken Thompson in 1973—a half century before my laptop was built) and look up flags and syntax I inevitably constantly forget. We should have been past this at least 15 years ago.
Pretty much any text editor worth its salt has find and replace, regex compatible, features. Even the extremely rudimentary TextEdit on your MacBook supports it.
The fact that foundational tools like grep still work over half a century later is a feature, not a bug, of our field.
How many cloud based services (most if not all of which rely on those foundational half-a-century-old building blocks, by the way) that are pushed to customers today will still be around in half a century?
- dvt 3y ago> regex compatible Even a typical Product Manager, let alone a regular layperson, would have no idea where to start with regex, so it's a super weird thing to bring up. Of course grep is a great tool, just how the hammer is a great tool (invented around 3 million years ago); but we've moved past that. You can't use a hammer to do EUV lithography.
- gyomu 3y agoYou're right, most people just need basic word search and replace, which pretty much any text editor supports. Supporting regex covers that extra mile that some advanced power users might need, since you were referencing obscure grep flags. What kind of search and replace are you doing that is akin to EUV lithography?
- matthewfcarlson 3y agoA good example of something I was doing today. Taking some text and formatting it as a markdown table with proper spacing. Copilot made it super to highlight the line, type out what I wanted, then kept moving on. Manually it was lots of adding spaces, deleting spaces, and adding |s.
- scrps 3y agoI'd also imagine the time complexities of string rewriting systems are significantly more efficient than passing it off to an llm. Why not burn a couple hundred watts to do find and replace (/s)?