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Comment by fnands | Hacker News Reader

> Talking a PM down from a task that was never feasible

One of our EMs did this this week. He did a lot of homework: spoke to quite a few experts and pretty soon realised this task was too hard for his team to ever accomplish, if it was even possible. Lobbied the PM and, a VP and a C-level, but managed to stop a lot of wasted work from being done.

Sometimes the most important language to know as a dev is English*

s/English/YourLanguageOfChoice/g

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An aside, but I am curious: as an old hat today, I now find that using the Perl RE (though some of it lives on through sed) syntax as "we used to do back in the day" in regular communications confuses most people. People are usually unfamiliar with it, so I am slowly phasing it out.

What's your experience? And what do the "kids" use these days to indicate alternative options (as above — though for that, I use bash {} syntax too) or to signal "I changed my mind" or "let me fix that for you"?

/s/ is kind of a skeuomorph for me. I have never used sed but I understand this syntax.

I've never used Perl and I am not confused. It's just an eyeroll-inducing referential joke, and ironically a perfect example of OP's point. See also: $BIGCORP, Day_Job, etc

They could have just said "the most important language [...] is spoken language".

I understand the meaning — I am a self professed "old hat" :)

I am curious if this is still understandable in wider software engineering circles, esp outside the HN and Linux bubbles.

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