Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006)

It really bothers me that Google has allowed groups to deteriorate so much. At one time, it was actually a decent archive of Usenet history, but since then, search has deteriorated, and apparently, posts are sometimes missing. Perhaps the people who are now famous that posted on Usenet back then didn't want posts from their college days in the spotlight, and their friends at Google implicitly let the site go to hell. </conspiracy-theory> Edit: Hmm, I may be wrong. A…

Earlier posted in 2015 with 60 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083420

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…

It's interesting to me that JWZ likes Java the language and dislikes the JVM. Of course, most of his anti-JVM posts are at least ten years old, and the JVM was quite a bit worse then, but it seems odd to me that the Java language would look good to someone with a background in Lisp and C. The sentiment I see from most hackers I know these days is exactly the opposite: the Java language is not well-liked, but…