Easy to implement:
On 1331 "Easy" to use, Neil must have had his tongue in cheek, just ignore the thousands of lines of [Scite](https://sourceforge.net/p/scintilla/scite/ci/default/tree/src/) which is just a "test editor", but not easy to write a lexer for a language which was what we are talking about.
1074 is one persons opinion, not gospel truth, only _my_ opinion is gospel truth :grin: [end humility]
"Worse is better" says the user experience is poor to simplify implementation, but I would argue the implementation difficulty of writing lexers in C++ results in a better user experience due to the speed, try opening a big HTML in Geany and in gedit (which uses regex syntax highlighting). But certainly the lexer development experience is worse if you are not a C++ist.