Regex: linguistics meets IT

Now that’s an interesting picture, isn’t it? Yeah, you guessed right, it’s about language (read on to find out what these different types of hieroglyphs may be)😊

Language plays an important role in my life. I was a linguist before I switched to IT. Yeah, the dudes called linguists are the “language researchers”.

At first glance, linguistics and IT may seem totally unrelated. In fact, they’re not.

Years back, still in university, in a linguistics course, we were introduced to working with corpora (large collections of text for linguistic analysis 🔎📖). This was the first time I was confronted with REGEX. This systematic and precise way of finding patterns of text captivated me from the start! And I guess, it was the first spark of my future in IT 😉

While explaining what made me switch careers eventually would lead too far here, I can say that I still enjoy learning and speaking foreign languages (of which English 🇬🇧 is one for me 😊).

being precise, accurate, and finding patterns

Back to linguistics and IT commonalities. One of them is finding patterns, and the love for detail. Both these things also characterize my personal approach to life. I love being precise and accurate, and this helps a lot in IT 💻 – be it in making sure a given script has the right syntax (another concept from linguistics, by the way 😉) or finding regex patterns in log files.

Within IT, it’s coding and automating things with scripts I enjoy the most. Why do tedious manual work if it can be automated ⚙️, right? 🤗

Other than that, I enjoy basketball 🏀, good music 🎸(not just REGGAE 😉) and watching spy / agent thrillers 📺. Yet, most of the time, as one of the pictures hanging over my screens at home says, it is the following:

Code.

Sleep.

Debug.

Repeat.

And now that you made it to the end of the article, let me clarify: the picture above shows the word languages displayed in:

• phonetic transcription with symbols from the IPA ➡️ shows how one would pronounce the word ➡️ represents linguistics 🗣️
• regex ➡️ regular expression ➡️ shows a line of text with the word language plus any other small letter (like “s”) ➡️ represents IT 💻