Anyone who pretends to know how to use computers effectively
must know how to use grep. (grep is available for Windoze.)
Let's say that you want to search all of the files in the
current directory for lines that contain "foobar" or
"foo bar" or "foo-bar", followed later in the line by
"practise" or "practice", ignoring case.
grep -i "foo[ -]?bar.*practi[cs]e" *
The same regular expression could be used for searching
in a text editor. Can you imagine hiring a "programmer"
who doesn't even know how to perform searches in a text
editor? Neither can I. And yet there are those who
boast of this ignorance! Extremely disgusting.
Consider a four-year-old mamma's boy who has always worn
shoes that are fastened with velcro. When his father
tries to teach him how to tie shoe-laces, he pouts and
cries and says "That's too hard! I want my velcro!
Mommy never made me tie laces!"
A real programmer knows more than one language.
He knows, for example, that one can write a program
to extract information from text files much more quickly
in awk than in Pascal. That's what awk was designed for.
The fake programmers who know Pascal and nothing else
refuse to learn anything new, saying: "The time I would
spend learning regular expressions could be spent honing
my Pascal skills."
The four-year-old mamma's boy refuses to learn to tie his
shoe-laces, saying: "I'll get better and better at sticking
the velcro together."
I wish that the Pascal community would be purged of the
fake programmers who are pampered, smug, and self-indulgent
and who refuse to learn new things. Perhaps then Pascal would
become more practical and attractive to real programmers.
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