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.
Most 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....
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.
Having 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).
Comments
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.
Most 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....
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.
Having 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).
our mandatory legal research class covered wildcard searches and "w/" x number of words/characters
I guess mine covered wildcards and some search operators, now that I look back. Nothing that remotely prepared me for learning regex though.