At one point, I didn't know Perl and had to work on a project with it.

For a while I was cursing the arcane syntax such as $_, $\ and even $ on a variable to the left of the equal sign...

and then something weird happened. Those things became idioms in my mind and I started achieving a sort of fluency.

And when I started to think in perl, I found it to be the highest-level language I had EVER worked in. I could express myself because there were multiple ways to do something and one always matched what I was thinking.

For example, instead of having to think IF NOT SOMETHING I could UNLESS SOMETHING and then express it as

  unless(something) { do_something(); }

or even:

  do_something() unless something;

Now I like the idea of regular expressions, but I find the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. or should I say implementations plural.

To me, the main usability problem with regular expressions boils down this: it is hard to distinguish between a literal and a regex control character.

This is exacerbated because regex control characters are usually the same characters other languages treat specially as well.

So you have regular expressions - which are somewhat straightforward, but you have to escape them for the place you are USING the regular expression - perl, shell script, sed, awk, grep or egrep, etc.

So I've used regular expression for decades, and even now it's always subject to a little trial and error and requires testing.