That seems to be a commom theme. Reading this, I feel guilty for not actually understanding how to compose a regular expression. I use a generator when one is necessary.
I can give you something close to that. In a thread from 1995[1] some users were skeptical and not buying the C++ hype:
> A typical programmer uses FORTRAN, COBOL, C or if they believe the hype, C++. Typical programmers don't use functional languages.
From quite a few posts I saw I gathered that a lot of people thought C++ was not going to gain any real adoption, and an OO C was stupid. Which, looking at it from today’s point of view is hilarious. Makes you wander what new thing we’ll all think is just a trend but will become ubiquitous in 20 years.
http://computer-programming-forum.com/39-ruby/b1f5cedd082572...