Well, there’s at least one advantage: apparently this builder library automatically escapes literal strings passed to it, so you no longer need to worry about i

Well, there’s at least one advantage: apparently this builder library automatically escapes literal strings passed to it, so you no longer need to worry about injection bugs if you construct patterns dynamically (cf. parametrised queries versus ‘come on, just use mysql_real_escape_string, it’s not that hard’), I’m not sure this alone pulls its weight, though; most of the time, regular expressions are fixed at compile time. And I’d still prefer something that mostly preserves commonly-understood pattern syntax. Having to guess whether ‘anythingBut’ means (?!...) or [^...] is not encouraging. (This was apparently ported from JavaScript, where it is even more pointless: template literals can take care of the escaping part without abandoning standard pattern syntax. But as far as I know, Java has no equivalent feature.)