Amanda, that's neither an obsessive nor a TS trait -- it's a
good programmer's trait. Like you said, you can read it and use it afterwards. (But mild OCD tends to bring it out a bit more.)
Regexps are beautiful, to me, precisely because they're so ugly. There's nothing like a little inline perl regexp magical incantation to make some poor n00b's eyes glaze over as you fix their file structure.
More xkcd:
Regular Expressions
