The concepts themselves have helped me a lot when programming parsers / interpreters / compilers. Recently I've developed a language extension for Fortran 90 al

The concepts themselves have helped me a lot when programming parsers / interpreters / compilers. Recently I've developed a language extension for Fortran 90 along with a parser/analyzer in python that extracts structural information of the the program as well as the additional directives. Solved it in <1000 lines of python by combining an FA like structure (state switch using a dictionary function lookup with a state variable inside a loop) with regular expressions for the individual lines / state transitions. Sure, you could come up with this on your own quite easily, but FA give you some powerful concepts - even just knowing the keywords to google for can save you days of work. The gist: When it comes to computer science and mathematical concepts, don't ask why to study it, just study it - possible applications will probably come at some point later in your career.