Parsing also comes up in a stupidly large number of other areas within programming, including: serialization formats, network protocols, DSLs, log analysis, time series interpretation, NLP, unstructured data mining, and probably several I'm not familiar with. Fundamentally understanding what's going on when you're doing recursive-descent, shift/reduce, or combinator-based parsing unlocks a big toolbox that you can use to solve a number of other problems.
