i feel a bit like i re-opened Pandora's box.

If you read Friedl's book before ever using regex; you might never try, because the subject seems so complicated, but millions of people get by without major problems, having never read it. If your program requires you use a lot of complex regex, and performance is a high criteria, then reading the book will save you heaps of time, experiments and blind alleys, but it's not a good starting point.

And it is a similar thing with threading; there is so much folk-law out there saying they are complicated; many people are put off from even trying; but if you start with simple requirements and progress naturally, they aren't hard to make effective use of; even if extracting the last ounce of performance from them is something of a trial by fire to get right.

It's not helped by the continued existence of so many of the early, failed attempts, to 'simplify' them into 'patterns'.