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2 points by kinleyd 4410 days ago | link | parent

In the HN comments on the post, there was an interesting link to an old Steve Yegge post titled The Emacs Problem (https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem)

In it Steve starts off by emphasizing the importance of learning regex to handle text processing in support of the assertion that Lisp isn't particularly good at it (text manipulation), while at the same time noting that Lispers look askance at regex itself.

He goes on to look at the issue from these two vantage points and states:

"How did I get so far off the original track of text processing? Well, that's the punch line of this shaggy-dog story: it's all text processing! Log files, configuration files, XML data, query strings, mini-languages, programming languages, transformers, web pages, word documents, everything... the vast majority of your programming work involves text processing somehow.

What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do "simple" log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?"

Wow. I already like Lisp, but that really had my attention.