You can of course disqualify me in saying I can't possibly have persisted at learning it, if I don't like it. But I am inevitably "the guy who knows regular expressions" in the places I've worked. I do use them, for stuff like fixing tedious one-off data munging jobs without having to write an actual program to do it. But I
* Do it step by step, to avoid writing anything resembling a complex regex, because I've yet to meet anyone who can write a complex regexp without bugs.
You can of course disqualify me in saying I can't possibly have persisted at learning it, if I don't like it. But I am inevitably "the guy who knows regular expressions" in the places I've worked. I do use them, for stuff like fixing tedious one-off data munging jobs without having to write an actual program to do it. But I
* Do it step by step, to avoid writing anything resembling a complex regex, because I've yet to meet anyone who can write a complex regexp without bugs.
* Use "undo" a lot in that process.