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.

How to use it in a sentence

• "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."

If you actually want to learn more...

• 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.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.