I once worked on a product that was heavily invested in regular expressions, and fairly non-technical users generated more, often hundreds per day. Of course t

I once worked on a product that was heavily invested in regular expressions, and fairly non-technical users generated more, often hundreds per day. Of course this led to a certain amount of UI whack-a-mole: people learn a mini-language really fast when they use it all day at their jobs, and people are creative; whereas the "computer people" really needed the system to not grind to a halt because of a massively inefficient regex. From this I learned to see regexes everywhere when I look at text; and that we should always consider the "threat model" of our own users being good at their jobs.