title: Is Automata Theory dead?
body: <p>I loved the course I took in Automata Theory and Formal Languages, so naturally I started looking around the interwebs to learn what happened since the time the books on which the course was based were written. </p>
  
  <p>What I discovered was that the list of stuff I wasn't familiar with seemed to be very short. For example, from the list of automatons in the Wikipedia entry for the subject, half were covered by the course, and the other half were mostly related to the one language not covered by the course. </p>
  
  <p>Further, when researching about the applications of the theory, I got mostly the same results: programming language syntax, compilers, text search, and.... that's about it. </p>
  
  <p>So is it really that dead? Or does it continues to evolve? Are there new applications for the theory? </p>