I don&#x27;t always want to spend insane amounts of time writing full AST parsers. Sometimes it is a lot easier to write a simple, hacky, throwaway regex. It&#x27;s a bit much to claim that backtracking regular expressions, a very useful tool sometimes, should never ever be used and everybody should waste loads of time writing careful code even in situations where it isn&#x27;t required.<p>The problem is not the tool. The problem is using the tool for the wrong job - although who knows, maybe if they didn&#x27;t just chuck out a quick hacky implementation, then atom simply wouldn&#x27;t have the feature at all - in which case it is a trade-off between having the feature at all and an evidently tiny corner case bug that was easily fixed by someone who isn&#x27;t even a regular developer of the project.<p>So I don&#x27;t see the reason to be outraged or judgemental here.