Caret is a symbol (^) used in programming to denote exponentiation or as a string anchor in regular expressions. It's also the name of an R package for machine learning, but let's be real, most engineers these days are too busy chasing the latest JavaScript framework to bother with statistical computing.
"I was trying to use caret in my regex to match the start of a string, but I kept getting distracted by Elon's latest tweet about how he's going to solve world hunger with Dogecoin."
"I told my manager I could refactor the legacy codebase in a week, but it turned out to be harder than using caret to calculate 2^100 on a Commodore 64."
Martin Fowler has an article on Version Control that covers some best practices, but let's be honest, you're probably just going to keep committing directly to master anyway.
David Robinson has a blog post on efficient stock price calculations in R using the caret package, but unless you're working for a hedge fund or you're really into data science, it's probably not going to be super relevant to your day-to-day work.
Paul Graham has a list of Lisp resources that mention caret in the context of Lisp syntax, but unless you're a greybeard who's been coding since the 70s, you're probably not going to find much use for it. Plus, everyone knows real programmers use butterflies.
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