> If it is hard to developers, it is impossible to regular users.
What are you talking about? Regular expressions are used everywhere. On the backend it's text parsing, on the front end it's input validation. I have never written a complete application without using it. You're also the first person I've heard grumble about them.
I get that if regex is used in an overly convoluted or messy fashion, they become unreadable and unreliable. Just like assignment operators, nested division, or any other basic programming construct. But they are also remarkably powerful at solving simple pattern matching in a robust way. I recommend you go learn them instead of making baseless claims about "the number of developers who spit on the floor" when talking about them or whatever.
Many developers struggle with the "language" of regex - and no matter how many times I "learn it", it doesn't change the fact that I have to pull up references every time I'm building out an expression.
Grandparents post re: Excel had me curious actually - because I (personally) find the use of Left, Mid, Right, etc generally far more logical and readable than trying to parse a regex string.
A horrible but practical way to use them.
Being able to describe them in an Excel-like fashion and have it spit out a working Regex would be nice.
yes still SQL is everywhere
And the complexity of SQL to someone who already codes is marginal. Here in Excel we are talking about the complexity to someone with no coding experience.
The promise is that a Java (then Ruby) developer, could simply design the objects needed for the program, and the fields which need to be persistent could be automatically mapped to the database using ORM.
The reality is quite different of course, there's a reason ORM is so widely derided. But ORM is more about skipping the bookkeeping involved in setting up persistence for application code, rather than testability or opacity of SQL.
My guess in my organization (huge, 100k people) we probably have ~50 FTEs who do stupid work solely because of this feature not existing.
Excel formulas have long been too hard to comprehend if you were not the original author... and even if you did author it, 4 weeks later you won’t remember how it worked without a half hour of review!