I teach text processing to linguistics students who usually have had zero programming experience. I start by introducing regular expressions in the environment

I teach text processing to linguistics students who usually have had zero programming experience. I start by introducing regular expressions in the environment of a text editor. The students take quickly to the declarative nature of regexes and become excited by the power of automation. Moving on to scripting in a language is hard. I would prefer awk, but I usually have to introduce R, because that is what "everyone" is using these days. When faced with the complexity of a full language, most students lose their enthusiasm and never touch programming again after their thesis. You can accomplish quite a lot with a powerful text editor and just regexes. I think it would be better for most students to just stick with that.