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by noxToken 2324 days ago
Graphs for these really hammer home the point that regular expressions aren't magic. Parsers have so many abilities that when starting out, my expressions were horribly inefficient and missed many corner cases. Learning to graph them just like automata immediately made things easier.

When green devs are having trouble with regular expressions (and don't have a formal computer science background), I like to give them a crash course in DFAs.