Two problems | Ned Batchelder

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2021-06-23 16:00:21

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

BTW: Jeffrey Friedl dug into the history and found that someone said it about awk before jwz said it about regular expressions!

I seem to have developed a fascination for new variants of this joke, especially where the concept being referenced is important to the structure of the joke. For example, last June I said,

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, “I know, I’ll use threads,” and then two they hav erpoblesms.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use multithreading”. Nothhw tpe yawrve o oblems.

Some programmers, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use floating point arithmetic.” Now they have 1.999999999997 problems.

Some people, wanting an escape from their full-time job, think “I know, I’ll contribute to open source.” Now they have two full-time jobs.

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