I don't think regexp support has a lot to do with being "stringly typed". In fact, regular expressions are one of the best tools to avoid that antipattern in sc

I don't think regexp support has a lot to do with being "stringly typed". In fact, regular expressions are one of the best tools to avoid that antipattern in scripting languages, because they allow you to easily analyze string input and construct an internal representation from it. I think it's more that most of the scripting languages originally grew around the task of text processing (e.g. as system scripts), so their facilities for dealing with text are great. Languages like Java, C#, Go, Haskell, etc., had more of a focus on general computing.