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This guys is a laywer, with a mechanical engineering degree, and does coding on the side. He was also the guy who wrote the SCOTUS opinion tracking software th
by hobs 12y ago
This guys is a laywer, with a mechanical engineering degree, and does coding on the side.
He was also the guy who wrote the SCOTUS opinion tracking software that was all over HN a few months ago.
Seems like a cool guy, and unlike some posters I think regex are definitely something to start people off on.
Many people who are non-technical but have used a computer understand the concept of a wildcard operator, you just expand that knowledge a bit and they can do very powerful things if their jobs involves a large amount of text.
I had some realtors that I worked with, and after seeing me fly through some of the things they did, they were eager for me to teach a bit about regex (and gave them a simple simulator to give them instant matches, I think it was rubular at the time) and they wrote some simple rules to take like 10 hours of drudgery out of their jobs per week.
- igurari 12y agoMost lawyers understand the concept of a regex, so I'd agree that its a good place to start. Law students are taught how to search for caselaw using Terms and Connectors, which is a simplified form of regex: http://lscontent.westlaw.com/images/content/WLNT&CSearching.pdf http://lscontent.westlaw.com/images/content/WLNT&CSearching.... So they already have a lot of familiarity with the topic, and this just makes it easy for them to understand that coding is not so foreign as they might otherwise believe.
- the_watcher 12y agoHaving been to law school in the last 3 years (would have taken the bar 2 months ago had I finished), you are overestimating how many law students actually learn how to perform Westlaw/Lexis searches like that. You only really need to use them in a few select classes, and no one really attends anything more than the mandatory trainings (which cover things like how to log in).
- MWil 12y agoour mandatory legal research class covered wildcard searches and "w/" x number of words/characters
- the_watcher 12y agoI guess mine covered wildcards and some search operators, now that I look back. Nothing that remotely prepared me for learning regex though.