Re: Ugly regexps

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2021 21:58:17 +0200
> Content-Language: en-US
> Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> On 03.03.2021 21:21, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > And ERE isn't?
> 
> To be fair, extended regular expressions are the regular expressions 
> flavor most commonly used in the contemporary world, recent/popular 
> programming languages, etc.
> 
> So for a lot of people this won't be +1 thing to learn.

So we are now going to cater to users of other programs more than we
cater to Emacs users who are used to the Emacs RE syntaxes?  How does
that make sense?  Do other programs prefer the Emacs RE syntax to
their own?

We have rx for many years, and just recently enhanced it
significantly.  I fail to see how it would make sense to introduce yet
another RE syntax into Emacs, with all the overhead that brings with
it.  Maybe it could make sense as an ELPA add-on, but not in core.

More generally, I wish we stopped investing so much of our time and
energy in cleanups and other support tasks, and more to add
significant new applications and editing features.  That would make
more users happier, I think.