"Evan Laforge"
It illustrates a few nice things about haskell: laziness for the recursive defs and easy backtracking, low syntax overhead and custom operators for DSLs, composability, etc.
Although that is true, I somehow feel that showing a perl, ruby, or python programmer an alternate approach to regexps, a technique firmly ingrained into the roots of these languages, will not garner much interest in Haskell. I know this is the case for me. In fact, it was always a large negative for me that Haskell/GHC never had decent builtin support for regexps until recently (6.6). From a practical point of view, the tasks that I do frequently involve the use of regexps (for better or worse). Again, I'm not an academic, just an everyday python programmer trying to assist me in my day job. Upon thinking about this subject further, I think it would be very important that Simon somehow incorporates at least one use of the new regexp library. The target audience would by more likely to consider Haskell if it contains they're beloved tool of choice. Later, they can discover the elegance of parsec if needed. -Pete