[necubi]

That's sort of my point. People without a computer science education often lack the awareness of the gaps in their knowledge. So they don't set out to write a "parser," because they don't know that word.

They're faced with the problem of parsing some custom text format. Maybe they'll try some terrible regex hack (see: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454). Maybe they'll stumble onto recursive descent parsing. But if you've taken a class on compilers (or automata theory) you'll know when regular expressions are not up to a parsing task, and you'll know about parser generators and how to write a grammar for one.

How can these CRUD programmers avoid re-inventing the wheel if they've never been exposed to it?