True, but your argument can apply to any sort of abstraction (e.g. using C instead of assembly or even assembly over 1's and 0's). He's arguing that the nicer

True, but your argument can apply to any sort of abstraction (e.g. using C instead of assembly or even assembly over 1's and 0's). He's arguing that the nicer syntax is a valuable abstraction over regex's overly-complicated syntax, not that the syntax will be 100% the same as regex 100% of the time.