This completely illustrates what I hate most about ruby: the conflation of 'understandable code' with some sort of insane directive to turn everything into an E

This completely illustrates what I hate most about ruby: the conflation of 'understandable code' with some sort of insane directive to turn everything into an English sentence without any regard for what the code actually does. At its worst it's almost an obsession with enforcing technical ignorance. That said, regexes can be tricky to parse and making them clearer to the average person is a worthy goal.