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Comment by Pacabel | Hacker News Reader

What's the business justification for using "dialog" when the project leader(s) have requested "dialogue", however?

Let's assume that the debate was legitimate, doesn't that still put us one "replace all" away from fixing the problem?

I don't understand how these guys were "deadlocked" for weeks.

Because the spelling wasn't the root cause it was a symptom of a culture that had gone so badly wrong that people engaged in petty arguments just as a way to score points.

To be fair, a search and replace for "dialog" would also match patterns like, y'know, "dialogue" too, at least in all the naive replace-all algos I've seen in IDEs.

So, the traditional CTRL+F, or :%s/dialog/dialogue/g would have resulted in at least some instances of 'dialoguegue' as a result. Yeah, the obvious remedy there is :%s/guegue/gue/g, but that too could lead to unintended results, etc.

Not that I don't agree with the intent of your statement, search and replace across 20k lines of code, over however many files, is likely a more involved process than it sounds like.

Maybe some thing like s/dialog$[^u]|$$/dialogue\1/g

Or use variable renaming in an IDE that actually parses the code.

To match dialog but not dialogue in vim:

    dialog\>

...in other regex systems:

    dialog\b

"dialog" as part of a variable name with underscores:

    :%s/dialog_/dialogue_/g

"dialog" as part of a variable name with CamelCase:

    :%s/\([dD]\)ialog\([A-Z][A-z]*\)/\1ialogue\2/g

You don't need to capture every case in a single regex substitution, you can use a handful to cover pretty much every case though. This sort of change should not take more than a few minutes max of developer time.

I don't have experience with them, but I imagine an IDE with refactoring support should make these sort of changes trivial.

You can always replace dialoguegue with dialogue again afterwards.

Or use an AST and do a structural replace, rather than use text.

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