[conspire] Old Unix joke, endlessly recycled

[Rick Moen]

http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 16:58:00 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Deirdre Saoirse Moen <deirdre at deirdre.net>
Subject: Re: sig line about xml?
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Dire Red (deirdre at deirdre.net):

> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use
> XML." Now they have two problems. -- srparish
> 
> Source: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3538702/revisions

You know about the original quotation, right?  Make that quotations....
In case you don't:

  Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 
  “I know, I'll use regular expressions.”   Now they have two problems.
   (a .signature in a May 1998 comp.lang.python post by Fredrik Lundh)

It's generally misttributed to Jamie Zawinki, but he merely read Lundh's
Usenet post and then started using the joke, starting August 12, 1997
on alt.religion.emacs .

This, in turn, seems to have been a retread of a comment Jamie made
on the Unix Haters mailing list on Dec. 12, 1992:
“Some people, when confronted with a Unix problem, think ‘I know,
I’ll use sed.’ Now they have two problems.”

Which in turn was based on a comment Dzvid Tilbrook made somewhere in
1988:

“Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use AWK.' 
  Now, they have two problems.” -- D. Tilbrook


Anyway, it's a clever formulation but very much old hat.  I would not
sigify new versions of it unless they were particularly good in some
way.


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