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Getting AI to write good SQL

(cloud.google.com)
478 points richards | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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nashashmi ◴[] No.44010349[source]
AI text to regex solutions would be incredibly handy.
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RadiozRadioz ◴[] No.44010706[source]
This comment appears frequently and always surprises me. Do people just... not know regex? It seems so foreign to me.

It's not like it's some obscure thing, it's absolutely ubiquitous.

Relatively speaking it's not very complicated, it's widely documented, has vast learning resources, and has some of the best ROI of any DSL. It's funny to joke that it looks like line noise, but really, there is not a lot to learn to understand 90% of the expressions people actually write.

It takes far longer to tell an AI what you want than to write a regex yourself.

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1. crystal_revenge ◴[] No.44011532[source]
I personally didn’t really understand how to write regex until I understood “regular languages” properly, then it was obvious.

I’ve found that the vast majority of programmers today do not have any foundation in formal languages and/or the theory of computation (something that 10 years ago was pretty common to assume).

It used to be pretty safe to assume that everyone from perl hackers to computer science theorists understood regex pretty well, but I’ve found it’s increasingly a rare skill. While it used to be common for all programmers to understand these things, even people with a CS background view that as some annoying course they forgot as soon as the exam was over.