filipmandaric

Fair enough, but I really think the benefits of advanced regular expressions are underappreciated in non-production and even non-application contexts. Laypeople (and occasionally even developers) are impressed when you show them how to search through a document or file system using a really complicated pattern, where it would have taken several iterations of data manipulation to achieve the same result without using advanced regular expressions.

Most of the time I mention the topic of regular expressions to other developers, I usually hear self-critical commentary like "oh, I'm terrible at regex", and rarely anyone who loves them. I think they're great though, if you take the time to understand them. They're something like a Swiss Army knife for programming.