I think there's an important distinction between telling someone they've written "poor code" and telling them they're a "poor programmer". Whether the latter is true or not is irrelevant to the discussion at hand and comes across as an ad hominem argument.
I more or less agree with your criticism of parsing via regular expressions, but there was no need to distract us all with insulting Eric (and he should know better than to respond in kind).
One thing I asked myself after I wrote that comment was how I would feel if I had been on the receiving end. I think there would have been two reactions.
First, I would have had the sort of anger and upset reaction that would have come with someone describing my code as "looking like it was written by a poor programmer". I'm sure that I would have wanted to lash out at that person.
But that reaction would have quickly been replaced with deep shame that my code had been examined by someone and found to be very poor. Once I had examined the code I would have felt very bad because I had put something out there of that quality.
The irony is that had he actually contributed significant amounts of code to the larger open source projects, he'd be used to this sort of criticism. Hell hath no fury like a maintainer's scorn. Incidentally, I think that's why developers in the major open source projects tend to generally be pretty good: the commit crappy code, get flamed, fix, commit-cycle tends to be instructive.
It's the usual response he has; we should probably be used to it by now :)
I think poor programmer was a fair comment in the end; the code does demonstrate poor programming (rather than just poor code). On the other hand "snotty kid" struck me as too far; questioning programming ability is fair enough - even being rude about it isn't nice but at least reasonably acceptable. Personal attacks is just pram and toys throwing.
I more or less agree with your criticism of parsing via regular expressions, but there was no need to distract us all with insulting Eric (and he should know better than to respond in kind).