All this article tells me is that the author doesn't really understand regular expressions. The @ sign and escaped . make it pretty clear we're probably trying

All this article tells me is that the author doesn't really understand regular expressions. The @ sign and escaped . make it pretty clear we're probably trying to parse an email. Why do we allow all this reductive "why do we make this so hard" drivel? Why is it that people's attitude isn't, "wow, something I don't know, I should learn what this is..." instead of "STUPID HULK SMASH!!! HULK BRAIN HURT!!!! OWWWW!!!!" Like, I'm sorry the author sucks. He doesn't know regular expressions very well as parts of his post are just plain wrong, and his regular expression itself looks unnecessarily convoluted. Regular expressions exist because string parsing code fucking SUCKS. I started programming in Visual Basic, where there are no regexes and string parsing was a verbose hell of substring processing, array indices, and equivalency checks. Terse regular expressions can replace dozens of lines of word vomit, and the basic library of symbols isn't that hard to memorize. It is WAY easier to keep a regular expression in your head than the alternative.