Why would 40 years of computer science experience be relevant to predicting how most people behave? If you had said psychology or something, I can see it being relevant.

"most people don't think like that" is an odd statement. How do you know how most people think? You think most people don't understand how to ideate "all my friends except bob" to invite people to bob's surprise birthday party?

Thats syntactic sugar, right there. You don't need a degree in psychology to get this. You need a degree in computer science to know what syntactic sugar is.

I know they used to. I know people claim they still do. If they do, they seem to only treat it as a suggestion (like searching for a significantly less popular by very similar word) and ignore me when I tell them to exclude specific terms.

> How do you know how most people think?

Okay, I'm not going to play the game where I have to keep supplying evidence and you keep denying it. What do you want. Google agreed with me, you have no training in anticipating how people think and the rarity of people capable of being programmers are sufficient for me to say it's time for you to start supplying proof of your blatant assertions.

> You think most people don't understand how to ideate "all my friends except bob" to invite people to bob's surprise birthday party?

Correct. And certainly even if they can it's only because that example is particularly simple (it's the same as always only without Bob). It doesn't solve 99% of use cases.

I'm not disputing that syntactical sugar is nice, I'm saying people are not capable of the complex operations to make the system you are positing work the majority of time for the majority of people, they will either quit in frustration or send their drunken party pictures to their boss or mother.