He definitely used a significant amount of elbow grease on this project. I’m sure that it was at least a year’s worth of work for him, but he actually gave this

He definitely used a significant amount of elbow grease on this project. I’m sure that it was at least a year’s worth of work for him, but he actually gave this same talk several times that year so I bet he came out ahead. On the other hand, Regex::Debugger is something I really miss when I am working in any other language. I think Perl is unique in having a real debugger for regexes. The closest analogue is re-builder in Emacs, which lets you type a regex and see how it matches against a bunch of sample text. Very useful, but not the same as stepping through the regex.