by jbarrow on 9/15/14, 2:02 PM with 43 comments
by hobs on 9/15/14, 3:18 PM
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.
by danso on 9/15/14, 3:05 PM
I've spent most of my life in the journalism world, and I imagine parts of it, especially the investigative projects time, share some characteristics with the law world...in that you're dealing with messy documents and data. You would not f--king believe how much time is wasted on manually reading lists of names/addresses, because the person has no idea how to split "Smith, Bob -- 1020 Broadway, NY" into a spreadsheet. Nevermind the countless hours spent hand fixing whitespace or other formatting errors, things that could take seconds with even just Sublime Text.
Regexes are amazing because they teach people how to think in patterns, and that manually defining the pattern for your specific domain can be a very powerful thing. I've greatly increased the speed that I can research things across large document sets...simply by grepping documents for patterns that fit proper nouns, or even large money values (for example, /(?:\d{3},){2,}/)...when dealing with messily OCR'ed documents, in which phrases/words will have common mistranslations, being able to grep in order to find a key name/number/noun is incredibly powerful.
IMO, regex is exactly the first thing you should be teaching people like lawyers and researchers. It's a very powerful programming concept, but besides that, it is immediately useful to anyone who can use a text editor. And it opens the door to programming in general (because find-and-replace with a text editor gets old, you'll soon find the need to run grep from the CLI)
by afarrell on 9/15/14, 2:52 PM
by tkiley on 9/15/14, 5:49 PM
In a sense, a legal agreement seems like a cross-platform piece of software that is "executed" in the minds of the signing parties, their business associates, and occasionally the court system. Given that context, I'm a little surprised that lawyers and engineers tend to communicate and think so differently.
by themodelplumber on 9/15/14, 2:36 PM
Toward the end of the project, he wanted to do a lot of copy/paste-style "reuse" within the content management portion of the project, so I showed him how he could take advantage of the de-duplication features, and explained what DRY meant--just in terms of content management.
The next day I got an email about a bug he found, where a sidebar wasn't showing up properly or something like that.
His conclusion at the end of the email read:
"So this DRY thing doesn't seem to be working, can we please remove DRY?"
(I know, it's my fault for exposing the innocent client to such heavy terminology, blah blah blah...but I had a very pleasurable laugh about the whole thing)
by mooreds on 9/15/14, 2:24 PM
by the_watcher on 9/15/14, 8:05 PM
If this is actually an intro to coding for lawyers, it's an intro to programming for those with no technical background whatsoever. Which is really cool (not that those don't exist, but specifically designing this for a career path full of liberal arts types, not just for those with no experience, is interesting). I like that they start with regex and HTML/markdown, since, while they are not what anyone would call software development, they are a simple, quickly useful example of the basic concept of coding - expressing human instructions in a language designed to be understood by a machine. They also are some of the more quickly usable "coding" concepts, HTML & Markdown in the obvious cases, but regex familiarity makes Google Analytics much more powerful.
Looking forward to working through it and seeing what it's like. I sent it on to a few law school friends who had been somewhat interested in tech skills too.
by pinkyand on 9/15/14, 5:19 PM
by Total_Meltdown on 9/15/14, 2:52 PM
From Chapter 3, Exhibit 6:
{
"title": "Hey Jude" // <-- Missing comma
"group": "Beatles",
...
}by stevekl on 9/15/14, 3:24 PM
So many coding lessons are so irrelevant to business / law people. No, business people don't need to really learn how to code. They want to learn how to parse / clean messy spreadsheet data.
REGEX + basic loops and conditional in VBA will do wonders to the productivity of business people.
On a separate note, I am surprized that there is still no good graphical way to build regexes
by jroes on 9/15/14, 4:08 PM
by adultSwim on 9/15/14, 6:42 PM
[0-9]{1,2} U\.S\.\C. § \d+(\w+)?( \([0-9]{4}\))? Should probably be:
[0-9]{1,2} U\.S\.C\. § \d+(\w+)?( \([0-9]{4}\))?
\C. -> C\.
Great work! The line between computer user and computer programmer needs to be blurred. Many people who use computers would benefit from knowing a little programming. Just look at how useful Excel is.
by nibjib on 9/15/14, 2:50 PM
by xyclos on 9/15/14, 7:02 PM
by jorgeleo on 9/15/14, 2:29 PM
If the author is reading this:
WHY? out of all the horrors, why?