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10 lines to replace maybe 20 characters. How horribly verbose.

But that is exactly what I like about it. I rarely have to use regex, but when I do have to write or change something I always have to spend 15 mins reading (remembering) most of the things about it again, this would help me understand my old code way better.

This is good point, and without trying to debate anything, regex is something of an art form for some people and I guess as many people are averse to it as there are high school people hating Shakespear.

But to give a bit of substance, you can often use a dictionary type approach in a situation where regex is needed. Example: replacing accented latin with normal (ascii) latin.

I do sometimes pride myself in necromancing skills of resurrection old Perl scripts from perlmonks.com but I suspect it is more of a hobby that out of absolute necessity. I find the memes about Perl/Python and Starwars to be pretty funny and much more entertaining than people actually debating programming languages. [1]

[1] https://www.python.org/doc/humor/#python-vs-perl-according-t...

That describes all of Python, to an APL programmer.

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