Yeah I really don't like this. It reinforces the idea that the best programming languages should be dumbed down to avoid people ever abusing features. I fully

Yeah I really don't like this. It reinforces the idea that the best programming languages should be dumbed down to avoid people ever abusing features. I fully support the right to carry and bear footguns and that programmers need to be trained in the responsible use of them. So things like unicode identifiers (allowing the use of π as a variable name), custom operators and operator overloading (so `matrix * vector` rather than `matrix.VecMult(vector)`) can all be used in certain domains to produce perfectly readable domain-specific code. They can also be abused, but that isn't an argument against their use. The argument by the author seems to be around a case where in perl bashing on XML with regexps is easier than XML parsing, which sounds like proper XML parsing needs to be made simpler, easier, more performant, more standardized or whatever it is about proper XML parsing that causes perl authors to not use it. Somehow there's too much friction there which needs to be addressed. The way this argument usually winds up though is someone argues that regexp parsing needs to be made worse to punish people for using it in order to shepherd them into the "better" way.