Regular expressions are a more concise way of writing string matching and extraction code, often exponentially more efficiently than without. They’re also usually more compact than spoken English can represent. For example, this proofreading regex detects possible issues in spelling:
That's a really bad proofreading regex, though, because it will be wrong more than a third of the time--which is much, much higher than the expected real spelling error rate. The "i before e except after c" rule only has a high success rate when you add the caveat that it only applies to words where the ie or ei makes the sound [i:] (like in "believe", for example), and that caveat isn't expressible via regex.
Regular expressions are complex and oftentimes a tool might be necessary to get a better idea of what an expression will match. However, if we were to make the language to describe them more verbose that'd still not solve this issue. Having a concise way to describe them is a good thing. Those who grok them can do so quickly without having to read several lines of a more descriptive language and those who need assistance can still plug them into a tool.
/(?<!c)i(?=e)/