Regex Legends: The People Behind the Magic

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2021-07-18 09:30:06

Many people have contributed to developing and promoting the use of regular expressions since they were invented about half a century ago. Here's a short list of some of the most influential people behind the technology. I've written this up for two reasons:

Aho is the "A" in AWK, and co-author of the Dragon Book – a classic reference covering such topics as building regular expression compilers. He created the initial version of egrep, which provided a big jump in expressiveness from the primitive beginnings of early Unix grep.

Friedl began using regular expressions with Unix in 1980. He has since written the definitive work on the subject: Mastering Regular Expressions, published by O'Reilly Media. Now in its third edition, it is widely considered a classic programming book (see e.g. this Slashdot review). The longevity of his experience with regexes helps to make him a shrewd opponent in regex debates… odds are he's already succinctly countered your quackery ten or more years ago on Usenet, and has the links to prove it. Friedl lives in Kyoto, Japan with his family of three.

Goyvaerts – a Belgian who's been living in Thailand for several years – is not as widely known as the others on this list, but his contributions towards helping thousands of people learn and use regular expressions are significant. Goyvaerts creates the best-in-class tools RegexBuddy and PowerGREP, which use his own JGsoft regex engine (notable for its support of most syntax from popular regex flavors including Perl, .NET, and Java). His website regular-expressions.info – based on the PowerGREP/RegexBuddy help files – is the best and most popular multi-flavor regex tutorial or reference online.