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> Thanks for voicing your opinion. That said, I don't see constructive criticism here. From what I gather I was basically at fault for daring to somewhat disagree with burntsushi.

I don't think it's so much "what you said" or even "who you said it to" but "how you said it". Most of us are coming to this thread specifically because we _don't_ already have specialized knowledge in this area, and we were hoping to learn something. It's totally reasonable not to have time to explain something this complicated, but it comes across as a bit disingenuous when followed by many additional comments in the thread continuing to debate in what looks to be close to real time. I think in this case, people are downvoting more for a breach of "decorum" than for anything else; you might very well be correct in your assertions about regexes, but it's impossible for any non-experts to tell, so we end up seeing (fairly or not) picture of someone who is more interesting in spending time arguing that they're right than actually demonstrating it.

> From what I gather I was basically at fault for daring to somewhat disagree with burntsushi.

Not so much for disagreeing. More for engaging a lower-effort way (than the person you were talking to) and appearing to assume that burntsushi was coming from a place of ignorance.

> The whole "general-purpose regex engine" thing was moving the goalposts in the first place and not very relevant to this whole discussion anyway. EDIT: I'm not saying that these distinctions don't matter at all, rather what I want to say is that it doesn't make sense to implicitly call upon a subjective and arbitrary standard.

"general-purpose regex engine" is a direct response to "most regexp libraries are stuck in the 80s/90s". It's about why the regex libraries most people use (the general-purpose ones) haven't adopted the ideas that you're advocating. Seems on-point to me; on HN most readers will be mainly familiar with the general-purpose libraries, so they'll be thinking in terms of those.

> This is an appeal to authority.

I understand how you might think this. However, please consider that the statement you were responding to is establishing a bonafide - a reason why burntsushi's words might be worth consideration.

Sometimes an appeal to authority is not wrong.

In my experience, the more I study a topic, the smarter other folks appear.