You're not wrong. I think OP is a generalized rant that is a bit dismissive of problem solving diversity. I think OP's gist is: if you don't understand a tool,

You're not wrong. I think OP is a generalized rant that is a bit dismissive of problem solving diversity. I think OP's gist is: if you don't understand a tool, don't use it. But even that is specious. Normal regular expressions have been around since Kleene, Chomsky and Russell started framing them in the 40s/50s. They are a powerful tool for lexical analysis, PERL showed us that in the early 90's. Dismissing them is just gatekeepy, IMHO.