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Ok. I did read your posts, especially the one I replied to, and it does in fact seem relevant. However with that level of snark, I'm just gonna drop out of the

by Tiksi 10y ago

Ok. I did read your posts, especially the one I replied to, and it does in fact seem relevant. However with that level of snark, I'm just gonna drop out of the conversation here as it's unlikely to be productive. Thanks.

savolai 10y ago
Sorry. Perceived snark was completely unintended. What I have thought to have repeated here starting from the actual blog post, is that it is completely natural for you to perceive that the escaping is just a nuisance. You are an expert user who has already overcome the initial pain, so you can't feel it. That initial pain is exactly what I am trying to help users overcome. The pain wasn't a prohibitive barrier for you, but you can't really deduce anything from this fact. This is why your perception about your own experience of using regexes is not very useful to this discussion about whether Regex UCR is useful to its main target group. The title of the post was You Are Not Your Users, remember? You are an expert on the tool - that does not mean you are an expert on every use of the tool, of all of the people on this planet, who would use the tool, if only it wasn't broken for them. It also doesn't mean that only difficulty of the usecases you find relevant, like matching parentheses, are the only valid criteria for these users to evaluate whether regexes are useful for them. You bias, as you mention, seems to make it difficult to perceive this. There's nothing wrong with that, of course - that's what most of reddit was doing too. As more and more people are accustomed to modern user experiences, more and more of even developers will not want to go through stone walls just to get a simple matching task done. They require quality from their tools. Also, as many people will never become experts, the initial pain will just repeat on, and on, and on, and on. Correction: brudgers and Tiksi - As you may have noticed by now, I did not notice I was talking to two different people, and my comments reflect this. Apologies for the confusion.
- brudgers 10y ago
  For what it's worth, I am not an expert on regex's. A few times a year I might write a very simple regex for something that would otherwise require a lot of tedious repetition. They're just another thing I find intellectually interesting and my comments are based on my struggles to learn them as a non-developer.

by Tiksi 10y ago

savolai 10y ago

Sorry. Perceived snark was completely unintended. What I have thought to have repeated here starting from the actual blog post, is that it is completely natural for you to perceive that the escaping is just a nuisance. You are an expert user who has already overcome the initial pain, so you can't feel it. That initial pain is exactly what I am trying to help users overcome. The pain wasn't a prohibitive barrier for you, but you can't really deduce anything from this fact. This is why your perception about your own experience of using regexes is not very useful to this discussion about whether Regex UCR is useful to its main target group. The title of the post was You Are Not Your Users, remember? You are an expert on the tool - that does not mean you are an expert on every use of the tool, of all of the people on this planet, who would use the tool, if only it wasn't broken for them. It also doesn't mean that only difficulty of the usecases you find relevant, like matching parentheses, are the only valid criteria for these users to evaluate whether regexes are useful for them. You bias, as you mention, seems to make it difficult to perceive this. There's nothing wrong with that, of course - that's what most of reddit was doing too. As more and more people are accustomed to modern user experiences, more and more of even developers will not want to go through stone walls just to get a simple matching task done. They require quality from their tools. Also, as many people will never become experts, the initial pain will just repeat on, and on, and on, and on. Correction: brudgers and Tiksi - As you may have noticed by now, I did not notice I was talking to two different people, and my comments reflect this. Apologies for the confusion.

brudgers 10y ago
For what it's worth, I am not an expert on regex's. A few times a year I might write a very simple regex for something that would otherwise require a lot of tedious repetition. They're just another thing I find intellectually interesting and my comments are based on my struggles to learn them as a non-developer.