[brandall10]

I was excellent at regex early in my career... actually had a job where that's basically all I did for 9 months. Read the O'Reilly book Mastering Regular Expressions from cover to cover and referenced it multiple times per day. Doing regex at a high level was instinctual.

Lost much of that knowledge within a couple years after leaving that job... was shocked how much wasn't retained when I stumbled into another project that required a fair bit of regex work. There was some muscle memory involved and I was able to ramp up quickly, but now 20 years after that initial job I'm just like you.

[brainwipe]

In fairness, I don't think I was ever a heavy user quite like you describe but if I take another language that I knew well and now dip into every so often - like C - I'm going again in 5 minutes. I don't find that with regex. I do try ... I think it's cool but it just slides straight out.

[brandall10]

I think the difference though is C is not unlike most procedural programming languages. The main thing I imagine is coming back up to speed w/ stdlib and having to get back into the rhythm of managing memory. Regex is unlike anything you typically do on a day-to-day basis. It's just an alien mental model and once you get past the basics feels like you've acquired some sort of superpower few actually need.

It's like being a native English speaker who also speaks a few other latin based languages vs. having that one eastern language thrown into the mix.