My point was that the original post seemed really judgmental in implying that building a RegEx engine ought to be done by everybody. Instead of "every programmer ought to have the experience", they could have said, "it can be valuable to have the experience".
But a blanket statement that every programmer should do X... is really annoying and shows a very narrow worldview. Programmers are diverse, and do lots of different things.
Wow, overreaction... there is a standard human communication idiom that is being followed here. For example movies are labeled as "must see", food is described as "you have to try...", and so on. Everyone[1] understands this to be a hyperbolic phrasing that isn't to be taken literally, but to really emphasize how important the speaker[2] finds the experience. Relax a little on the pedantry, it invalidates any statements made about better uses of one's time.
[1] The sentence that references this footnote uses the phenomenon it describes for emphasis.
[2] This is a similar, but distinct phenomenon of using a term, in this case speaker, with the implicit understanding that it can be generalized, in this case to "communicator". It shouldn't be confused with the situation described, but is also a useful pattern to understand for basic communication.
My point was that the original post seemed really judgmental in implying that building a RegEx engine ought to be done by everybody. Instead of "every programmer ought to have the experience", they could have said, "it can be valuable to have the experience".
But a blanket statement that every programmer should do X... is really annoying and shows a very narrow worldview. Programmers are diverse, and do lots of different things.