This is of course very true, there are plenty of problems to solve and a lot of them are challenging and require experienced programmers with a great grasp of logic to solve.

revTalk is a language which professional programmers use, day in day out, to solve complex real world problems more productively than with alternatives. Which isn't to say that its the right tool for every job or that other languages don't have their place, far from it.

But that said, there is also a class of user, who isn't a programmer, who doesn't want to be a programmer, but who has something to say. We're all experts in something but few of us are experts in programming. In the Web 2.0 world more and more people want to be able to go beyond creating a static web page. For example, we see lots of school teachers use Rev to create interactive materials for their students. The existing web languages don't serve that group of people particularly well.

It seems you may have made the point in favor of revTalk and not even realized it. Assuming no previous knowledge of programming languages, which would you rather learn?

answer char 1 to 3 of word 2 of line 5 of theString

Or:

alert(theString.replaceFirst("(.*\n){4}\\s*\\S+\\s+","").substring(0,3));

Get a single one of those symbols wrong and it won't work.

And what about maintenance? You can read the revTalk example but you'll have to read the other example very closely to remember what it does. In this example you've found a way to do something with a similar number of lines of code, but perhaps we could say that the revTalk requires rather less thought in writing that line. The productivity benefit may still be there.

BTW, if you are familiar with regex and therefore want to continue using them, they are fully supported in revTalk, too.

You could try learning with revTalk. Its a very high level, English-like language thats easy to learn, read and write. Instead of focusing on esoteric syntax, you can focus on what you're trying to do. Its perfect for beginners because they get to see results very quickly. Yet its powerful enough that you can learn proper principals of software engineering when you're ready. There is a free version available for all platforms http://revmedia.runrev.com/