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by flukus
3484 days ago
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> I'd love to see more powerful, versatile searches generally available--booleans, date ranges, so on and so forth--but regex is ridiculous overkill for most people's use cases. To do that you're going to reinvent regex, usually with a clunkier interface that has to be re-implemented everywhere. Or you'll come up with a text based system like google, which is again it's own domain specific language. Edit - in fact, I just remembered we have such a tool where I work. Because the support folks were deemed to be too stupid to learn regex we created a custom "language" that turned out to be a bastardized, dumbed down version of them. Instead of the support staff learning a skill for life, they only learn our abomination. |
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I was thinking of Google's system specifically, yes.
I use regex a lot. It's extremely powerful, and when you really need it then nothing else will do. It's also phenomenally obtuse, it takes a real time investment to become fluent in it, and 95% of users will never need its power.
People aren't ignorant of regex because they're stupid or uneducated. They're ignorant of regex because they don't need it. They wouldn't use it if they had access to it, because they have better things to do with their time. They'll get more done if you give them a tool whose power-to-usability balance is actually suited to their needs.
Regarding your support staff, perhaps they did in fact need regex despite that decision, or perhaps your custom language was not the right choice for their needs. That doesn't mean that the typical user has any use for regex.