Comment by klibertp

> But they [regexes] also tend to be completely unreadable

Regular expressions can be constructed using various syntaxes. Some are optimized for writing them out quickly, and some are not. Choose the latter when going to production, and you'll be fine.

As for K/J/APL - it's similar. You can write incredibly terse code which works wonderfully in a REPL (console). Working in an interactive manner is the default mode of operation for those languages. If you ever worked with Numpy/Pandas or similar, in a REPL, you likely concocted similarly terse monstrosities. Check your %hist the next time you have a chance. Going to production, you naturally rewrite the code instead of just committing the first one-liner that produces the desired results.