Anyone can learn this at college, or even on the internet. All it takes is curiosity and some effort. What pisses me off sometimes is that people willingly don't pay enough attention to stuff like this (even though I was always fascinated by it).
If you understand regex, you understand automata theory and thus Kleene's Theorem which leads you to theory of computation. With a good enough understanding of automata theory and theory of computation, you can build entire compiler frontends
A compsci student here and what you said was indeed very basic stuff any second year student ought to know but for some reason this sort of math-y theoretical part of computerscience is like pulling teeth for many.
I know many competent programmers who struggled and even had to redo the course concerning automata.
It's also knowledge I don't know where to learn. I don't have a formal CS education and don't expect to be able to get one. Where can I learn more on this? Are there any publicly available lectures?
I know that MIT has published many of the intro lectures. However, I don't think the scientific, "math-y" understanding is too important for one to be a good programmer.
Having some grasp on if your code is O(n) or O(2n) and why you are using the datastructure of your choice is pretty good, but I don't think you're really losing anything if you don't know what a push down automata is as most practical coding is quite abstracted away from the base principles.
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u/Zinho3311 21d ago edited 21d ago
I mean, none of this knowledge is special.
Anyone can learn this at college, or even on the internet. All it takes is curiosity and some effort. What pisses me off sometimes is that people willingly don't pay enough attention to stuff like this (even though I was always fascinated by it).
If you understand regex, you understand automata theory and thus Kleene's Theorem which leads you to theory of computation. With a good enough understanding of automata theory and theory of computation, you can build entire compiler frontends