I needed to do pattern matching to pull data out of many different formats, then clean the data before processing it. We were parsing radio station song feeds, and the data is varied, chaotic and often unavailable. This was also a port of a perl POE app, and so it was regex intensive in its original implementation and I don't see how you could effectively deal with such noisy text without regexes.
As to snark - his reply was snark, I just replied in kind. Regexes are incredibly useful for all kinds of things, most especially in parsing data from web services. The fact that he didn't need them isn't 'funny,' it means we were doing different things.
In any case - using Erlang for something like this is so much win. The POE, and threaded implementations got real ugly real fast as we scaled it up. I knew Erlang could do it - across boxen, without a problem. It sounds like the regex libs have improved, and I look forward to using Erlang again in the future.
As to snark - his reply was snark, I just replied in kind. Regexes are incredibly useful for all kinds of things, most especially in parsing data from web services. The fact that he didn't need them isn't 'funny,' it means we were doing different things.
In any case - using Erlang for something like this is so much win. The POE, and threaded implementations got real ugly real fast as we scaled it up. I knew Erlang could do it - across boxen, without a problem. It sounds like the regex libs have improved, and I look forward to using Erlang again in the future.
Happy? :D