I just found a nice little regular expression tool called
Regulazy. It helps generate simple regular expressions based on the text that you select. The following description is from its website
Regulazy is a visual Regex Creation tool for beginners. Easy point and click user interfaces, predictive technology and much more! Still in alpha, but more features are coming!
Haven't seen such a tool before that can analyze text and supply you with a simple regular expression. Don't expect miracles for difficult types of text though.
Jeff Atwood just posted a very interesting item titled
Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats in other words about how to find out if a person has enough potential to become a good developer.
Its a very interesting read but after reading his post I just compared it to math. You either:
- get it because everything seems logical and all variations with formulas feel natural.
- you know how to use a formula in a certain context but variations will get your head spinning.
- you just don't see it and all formulas just look the same but the simple questions will be ok because you reminded them 1 on 1 in your lessons.
Translating this to software developers:
- you are a real developer and are capable of creating your own frameworks without much input.
- you know your bits and with good input the result will be good enough but not excellent (garbage in garbage out).
- you can only live as a programmer with the help of google.com and codeproject.com.
So... what kind of developer are you :-)