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Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

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Re: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

#11

Post by gruseom »

Zak wrote: post #9
hernan7 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That rant is from 2000 indeed, where you could still like Java the language. Back then (late '90s) Java the language was nothing like what we have today. If your first language was, I don't know, C or Perl, you could read some short-ish Java book (or the Sun tutorials) and learn enough to write a little applet to spiff up your website. These days learning Java, with all the stuff that has been added to the language (…

Java from the late '90s still had the characteristic that most hackers I know dislike in it today; it was intentionally designed not to be as powerful as it could be. Interestingly, Python seems to be well-liked by hackers despite sharing some of that characteristic[0]. It may be that the motivation is different. In Java it seems to be "you can't be trusted with sharp tools" while in Python it's more along the lines…

That's not overly off-topic, but yes, write a post about it. There's a subtle point in there.

Re: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

#12

Post by carbocation »

jseifer wrote: post #5

Shameless self plug: I created nyhtp.com based off of this quote after talking to a fellow dev as a quick learning experience with Sinatra/Mongo. The history was interesting, though.

http://www.nyhtp.com appears to be behind HTTP/Auth. Is this intentional?

Re: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

#13

Post by jseifer »

carbocation wrote: post #12
jseifer wrote: post #5

Shameless self plug: I created nyhtp.com based off of this quote after talking to a fellow dev as a quick learning experience with Sinatra/Mongo. The history was interesting, though.

http://www.nyhtp.com appears to be behind HTTP/Auth. Is this intentional?

It was a configuration error with www/no www. I fixed it, though. Thanks for the heads-up.

Re: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

#14

Post by telemachos »

gruseom wrote: post #10

But he doesn't track down the source of the quote, only of a famous usage of it by JWZ. If you read to the end of the post, it's clear that no one knows who originated it, but it was in .sig files already in 1988. Edit: simple googling reveals that David Tilbrook took credit for a variant of the line in 1989 ( http://grosskurth.ca/bib/1989/tilbrook.pdf , search for "awk"). Since that's long before anyone would have h…

I'm not sure what you're claiming to have discovered via simple googling, but the Friedl article explicitly discusses Tilbrook and the awk quotation. Tilbrook is exactly who is credited in the 1988 sig that Friedl mentions.

Re: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

#16

Post by bbatsell »

gruseom wrote: post #11
Zak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java from the late '90s still had the characteristic that most hackers I know dislike in it today; it was intentionally designed not to be as powerful as it could be. Interestingly, Python seems to be well-liked by hackers despite sharing some of that characteristic[0]. It may be that the motivation is different. In Java it seems to be "you can't be trusted with sharp tools" while in Python it's more along the lines…

That's not overly off-topic, but yes, write a post about it. There's a subtle point in there.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with the premise, but I'd also love to read a post exploring it.

Re: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

#17

Post by gruseom »

telemachos wrote: post #14
gruseom wrote: post #10

But he doesn't track down the source of the quote, only of a famous usage of it by JWZ. If you read to the end of the post, it's clear that no one knows who originated it, but it was in .sig files already in 1988. Edit: simple googling reveals that David Tilbrook took credit for a variant of the line in 1989 ( http://grosskurth.ca/bib/1989/tilbrook.pdf , search for "awk"). Since that's long before anyone would have h…

I'm not sure what you're claiming to have discovered via simple googling, but the Friedl article explicitly discusses Tilbrook and the awk quotation. Tilbrook is exactly who is credited in the 1988 sig that Friedl mentions.

Did I really make my point that badly? What you're saying is obvious; that's where I started.

The point is that the end of Friedl's post shows that the quote antedates JWZ, but he's not really interested in tracking it down any further, presumably because it was JWZ who applied it to regexes, which is Friedl's area of interest. Personally, I'd rather know the origin of the quote itself. I like knowing the sources of things.

As for what I was "claiming to have discovered" (though I hope not nearly so pompously as that), I would have thought that was obvious too: additional evidence that the line was Tilbrook's. I noticed later that a commenter to the OP cited the same link I did, so it's pretty findable.

Re: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

#18

Post by carbocation »

jseifer wrote: post #13
carbocation wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.nyhtp.com appears to be behind HTTP/Auth. Is this intentional?

It was a configuration error with www/no www. I fixed it, though. Thanks for the heads-up.

Thanks for fixing it.

http://nyhtp.com/hS1

Re: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

#19

Post by telemachos »

gruseom wrote: post #17
telemachos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're claiming to have discovered via simple googling, but the Friedl article explicitly discusses Tilbrook and the awk quotation. Tilbrook is exactly who is credited in the 1988 sig that Friedl mentions.

Did I really make my point that badly? What you're saying is obvious; that's where I started. The point is that the end of Friedl's post shows that the quote antedates JWZ, but he's not really interested in tracking it down any further, presumably because it was JWZ who applied it to regexes, which is Friedl's area of interest. Personally, I'd rather know the origin of the quote itself. I like knowing the sources of…

I don't know if you made your point badly or not, but your tone surpised/confused me. You begin by saying, "But he doesn't track down the source of the quote, only of a famous usage of it by JWZ." Later you add that Friedl as the author of such and such "is only interested..." in so and so (my emphasis). In both cases, I read that as criticism - as if Friedl failed to do the important thing that you were now doing. In this post again you you say that Friedl is "not really interested" in the source.

But, in fact, Friedl did track down the source of the original quotation - to a reasonable degree of certainty. It's the same source you found. So I guess I don't see what Friedl didn't track down.

Re: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote

#20

Post by cabalamat »

Here is a regular expression for C++-style comments

   (/\*([^*]|[\r\n]|(\*+([^*/]|[\r\n])))*\*+/)|(//.*)
(source: http://ostermiller.org/findcomment.html )

I recently wrote a lexicasl analyser for a language that uses C++-style comments. My first attempt used regular expressions, but I later scrapped them for something I could understand. Here is the relevant bit:

      # //... comments
      if ss.isNextSkip("//"):
         ss.skipPast("\n")
         return

      # /*...*/ comments
      if ss.isNextSkip("/*"):
         ss.skipPast("*/")
         return
I will leave it to the reader to decide which is clearer.
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