I taught a short (2 day) Perl training course a few weeks ago and it included one heavy little component that’s all regular expressions. As it’s something that always figures as a training requirement, it’s now pretty well practiced, and, I like to think, effective too, but mid-afternoon on the second day, after a lunch that included pret-a-manger sushi, even -I- feel the pain of /(?:\s[1-9]{1,2})+\w+/. Too much too soon can be like being forced to spend the afternoon peeling onions: it makes your eyes hurt and can induce tears. It’s hard to make regular expressions anything other than heavy machinery and I’m sure that they are one of the reasons that Perl gets this bad press of being ‘line noise’ (despite the fact that perl style regular expressions are in use in many languages).

So, naturally, I was very pleased when I received this email from one of the course students, about a week after the course had finished:

Thank you Nito! I very much enjoyed it… and on that note: http://xkcd.com/c208.html

It’s always nice to get feedback, and that’s perfect feedback.