Wandering onto an alien planet

It's one of those things that a programmer should know, but I've always managed to make excuses not to dive into. If you're not familiar with the term "regular expression," no worries--they merely provide a way to search for specific text patterns, something that comes up time and again in programming. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, and any number of programming languages are optimized to make them lightening-fast. And best of all, they don't require lines upon lines of code.

There's a price, though: The incredibly lean and flexible syntax is quite dense, and completely alien to someone raised on languages from the C and BASIC families. Also, the web tutorials I've encountered today don't seem to bridge that language barrier very convincingly. As in, "Wait! Pattern? Modifier? Just tell me which one's the needle and which one's the haystack." As usually happens, much of even the proverbial 30,000-foot understanding finally hinges on a web browser, a code editor, and the elusive uninterrupted half-hour, 15 minutes of which is typically wasted on just resisting the urge to punch just one more word combination into Google rather than settling in with the three or four open browser tabs.

Which makes me wonder what professions outside of I/T do their real learning like that. Not the required number of hours/year spent pretending to take notes on a PowerPoint given in a hotel ballroom. Not memorizing enough regulatory updates long enough to pass re-certification. The real deal. Picking their way through foreign terrain, on bivouac and quite often living off the land. Not the tour bus and a guide with a microphone. Or is the contrast just more apparent in I/T? I've spent too much time there too know anymore.