Sometimes when I work with some data, that data is more precise than I expect. One might think that would be a good thing, after all precision is good, so more is better. But hidden precision can lead to some subtle bugs.
Several years ago, developers had a good reason to feel uncomfortable about using plain WebSockets in production — The WebSockets protocol had gone through a number of iterations and many web browsers still had not implemented the WebSocket API. Back then, apps that needed to receive real-time notifications from a server had to resort to a number of 'hacks' to simulate the behavior of a long-lived/stateful real-time connection.
It was my second year of university, and I was spending my spare time creating an off-road car racer. I started off with a procedural heightmap generator (based on good old Perlin noise), some texture blending, volumetric fog and water with reflections and refractions. This was all the rage back in 2004!
I'm not completely sure where I stand as to the universal utility of regular expressions, but I did meet with a problem recently with the markdown parser that our team was using on a project.
But post Snowden, and particularly after the result of the last election here in the US, it's clear that everything on the web should be encrypted by default.