<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@dabeaz" class="u-url mention">@<span>dabeaz</span></a></span> sometimes a programmer buys a lottery ticket, and they win.</p><p>Other times they turn to a regex...only to reimplement it in explicit, stateful code a few weeks later. :-)</p><p>(sure, I have my lot of regex working neatly - but it was really sad the day I had to change my 3-line regex-using-method for parsing something by 50 LoC)</p>