He was also the guy who wrote the SCOTUS opinion tracking software that was all over HN a few months ago.
Seems like a cool guy, and unlike some posters I think regex are definitely something to start people off on.
Many people who are non-technical but have used a computer understand the concept of a wildcard operator, you just expand that knowledge a bit and they can do very powerful things if their jobs involves a large amount of text.
I had some realtors that I worked with, and after seeing me fly through some of the things they did, they were eager for me to teach a bit about regex (and gave them a simple simulator to give them instant matches, I think it was rubular at the time) and they wrote some simple rules to take like 10 hours of drudgery out of their jobs per week.