
Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006) - thewarrior
http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
======
raldi
There's actually a little more to the story than that. On 2007-01-09, I wrote
to David Tilbrook:

    
    
        Hi David .. I came across a web page
        (http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247) investigating the source of the
        following quotation:
    
            "Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use _____.'
            Now, they have two problems."
    
        The author of the site seems to have gone through a lot of trouble to
        hunt down the original author of the quote. The best he was able to do
        was discover a Usenet sig from 1988 attributed to "D. Tilbrook."
    
        I was wondering if this was you -- if so, I think you should contact the
        author to set the record straight. His post was recently linked from the
        news aggregator site Reddit, at
        http://programming.reddit.com/info/xlov/comments and quite a few people
        have been reading the story and discussing the quote.
    

He wrote back:

    
    
        I can lay claim to being the author, but I cannot remember when or where
        I first used it.
    
        Zalman Stern worked for me at CMU so may have quoted me, hence the
        attribution to him.
    
        Actually one of the funnier incidents regarding my "famous" quotes was:
    
            "Software is the only business in which adding extra lanes to the
            Golden Gate bridge would be called maintenance" -- David Tilbrook -
            circa 1981
    
        I was at a meeting when the speaker used this quote and attributed it to
        David Parnas -- I was appropriately indignant.
    
        -- david
    
        P.S.: Do we know each other?
    

The answer to his postscript was no. :)

And he later replied again to add:

    
    
        By the way, I think I coined the phrase at a European conference in
        Dublin circa 1985.
    
        I was talking about the difficulty maintaining portable software when
        supposedly "standard" tools (e.g., awk(1)) differed from system to
        system.
    
        Then later someone pointed out to me that it was appearing in various
        signature lines which I suppose led to its being spread.
    

I forwarded it all to Jeffrey Friedl (the author of the linked post), but I
guess he figured the comments already did a good job covering the story, or
maybe he wanted to get explicit permission from David to repost the emails but
never got it. But I think David's reply is interesting and compuhistoric
enough that I don't want it to die in my GMail archives -- and so I'm posting
it again here.

------
ericb
I have found holes in google's newsgroup archives previously. It surprises me
because it should be such a small amount of data in today's terms. It has
enough historical significance that you'd think they'd care for it better
given their mission to organize the world's data and make it universally
accessible.

~~~
InclinedPlane
A few points, it's a hard problem, google has put a lot of effort into solving
some of it, and it may not be fixable completely.

To start off with, usenet is ancient, much older than the web. Second,
archives have never been ubiquitous, expecially in earlier eras. The storage
media, e.g. tape, were troublesome and expensive, so most people didn't care.
The records we do have back then are from a small number of individual
archives (e.g. Henry Spencer's). It wasn't until much later that deja news
starting archiving usenet routinely, and even then there can be gaps due to
failed delivery. Also, it's possible for individuals to opt out of archiving
by setting the x-noarchive header or by contacting google. The result is a
swiss cheese record that won't get better unless we magically find new
archives and/or decide to violate people's privacy.

~~~
ericb
It is odd because I feel like I have gone looking for older pre-1999 posts
that used to exist in Google and they are no longer there. I had just assumed
that support for pre-2000 was dropped.

------
teamonkey
"You have a problem and decide to use threads. have two Now problems. you"

~~~
Too
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, 'I know, I'll use floating
point arithmetic'. Now they have 2.000000000000000000001 problems.

------
lutusp
It's a shame that regular expressions are so often associated with Perl, as
though they're a single topic. It's like speaking of astronomy and astrology
in the same breath.

~~~
mhd
"so often"? Really? That must be a rather particular age bracket, as newer
programmers probably don't know Perl at all (apart from its reputation), and
the old Unix-heads know that Perl itself didn't really invent them (or
basically anything, as Larry Wall would be the first to admit).

Sure, "Perl compatible" is a pretty common moniker (as in e.g. the "PCRE"
library), as the POSIX (or original grep/sed) implementations are a bit
anemic.

And I don't think any of them deserves to be compared with astrology, but
don't particularly care to get into that argument again. About as worthless as
vim/emacs/IDE discussions.

~~~
lutusp
> "so often"? Really?

The relationship with Perl was a point made in the linked article. I
personally don't use Perl any more, but I certainly use regular expressions.

> And I don't think any of them deserves to be compared with astrology ...

No, that wasn't meant as an analogy, just an example of contrasting entities
that are sometimes confused.

> About as worthless as vim/emacs/IDE discussions.

Complete agreement.

------
breck
Interesting quote by Zawinski in the comments:

    
    
        Third: obviously I got Kelly’s joke about “streams of
        bytes”, uh, that’s why I quoted it. It’s funny, and it 
        makes the point (which I fully agree with) that the 
        decades-old Unix “pipe” model is just plain dumb, 
        because it forces you to think of everything as 
        serializable text, even things that are fundamentally
        not text, or that are not sensibly serializable.

------
nathanstitt
I like the backhanded comment jwz pays Perl in the comments. To paraphrase:
“Perl; it’s not as bad as sed.”

Could really apply to everything. “Php; It's not as bad as Perl” ( _maybe_ ).
“Java; It's not as bad as C++”, etc.

Thinkgeek, are you listening? Would make an awesome geek coffeecup/T-shirt
set.

~~~
charliesome
> _“Php; It's not as bad as Perl”_

PHP is not _as_ bad as Perl, it's worse.

~~~
jacquesm
That depends on which version of PHP you're comparing with which version of
Perl.

Both have their strong points, both have their weak points.

------
icanhasfay
Today's relevant xkcd: <http://xkcd.com/1171/>

------
Mahn
Perhaps it's just me, but I find surreal how discussions on the internet 16
years ago were pretty much as they are today.

~~~
ordinary
[http://www.pompeiana.org/resources/ancient/graffiti%20from%2...](http://www.pompeiana.org/resources/ancient/graffiti%20from%20pompeii.htm)

It's translations of Roman graffiti found in Pompeii. If you're surprised
human nature hasn't changed in 16 years, prepare to be flabbergasted. :)

~~~
lemming
_On April 19th, I made bread_

I guess Twitter was pretty much the same back then, too.

------
FreakLegion
Slight tangent: Anyone interested in the substance of the post should also
read Russ Cox's "Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast" for why
Friedl is wrong:

<http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html>

~~~
alxndr
That was a fun paper to skim, thanks for the link. Gonna peek at the other
links in the Summary section at the bottom.

------
MattBearman
...and now I understand today's XKCD [0] - I'd never heard this quote 'til
today either. All is right with the world again :)

[0] - <http://xkcd.com/1171/>

~~~
mhb
In future similar situations, the xkcd individual thread forum may help:

<http://forums.xkcd.com/viewforum.php?f=7>

~~~
juan_juarez
...or this wiki:

<http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php>

------
MaysonL
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll quote Jamie
Zawinski.” Now they have two problems.

Attributed to Mark Pilgrim in a comment at
<http://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/who-said-that/>

------
homosaur
Great article, thanks to the author for chasing down and cataloguing another
entertaining and fine piece of geek lore.

------
rplst8
That broken link in the article is working fine for me. Did Google repair the
issues with the Deja News archive?

------
bitwize
Funny, I found myself referencing jwz when I called Wayland a CADT-compliant
approach to the problems with X.

