Boolean Chart Redesign

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 07/17/2010 07:52 PM, David Marshall wrote:
> I think they're pretty easy to understand, actually.  Each Boolean chart is
> AND'ed with everything else.  A Boolean chart, which can be individually
> negated, has rows that are AND'ed together.  Within each row, there are
> columns that are OR'ed together.

	You are also one of the few people intimately familiar with the code of
Search.pm.

> It is certainly not easy to do with with a Boolean chart, but it's possible!
> However, I don't want to explain DeMorgan's Law to anyone who would then
> need to apply them to a Boolean chart.

	There *are* logical groupings that are impossible, though, with the
boolean charts, because you can only NOT individual whole charts, so
DeMorgan's Law cannot be applied.

> I omitted the rest of Max's mail, but I want to chime in that I hate the
> notion of a parentheses button.  We have a number of management-type users
> at Yahoo! who just don't grok operator precedence and the need for
> parentheses.

	Okay. Do these manager types currently use and understand boolean
charts? Parentheses are not *necessary*, they are just used to add
operator precedence. If you fail to use them, the chart UI will work
similarly to how it does now.

	The proposal isn't about a UI for manager types or non-engineers--in
fact, it's not even about UI at all. Right now, I'm designing a backend
system that can be used to build queries. Once we have this, there are
already plans in place (known by at least pyrzak and I) to design a
simple search system that could be used by non-engineers very
effectively, but this email thread has absolutely nothing to do with that.

	-Max
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