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Comment by asciimike | Hacker News Reader

> I believe it was the inventor of Regex who said:

> Easy things should be easy, and complicated things should be possible.

Was he being serious when he said that? I'd hardly call regex a technology where easy things are easy and complicated things are possible (there are plenty of impossible things in regex implementations e.g. backtracking in RE2).

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I think (as applied to technology) it is originally an adage from Alan Kay and he worded it as “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” It wasn’t about any specific technology but rather for what they were building at PARC.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-Alan-Kay-s-ad...

Larry Wall adopted (adapted?) it for Perl:

“In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible.”

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-make-...

This is an engineering choice by RE2 to not support backtracking or lookahead in exchange for runtime guarantees. PCRE2, which is not much more complex, supports both of these, but doesn't give the same runtime guarantees as RE2. For someone who is operating on vast quantities of unknown, unsanitized data, eg. Google, RE2s limitations are a reasonable tradeoff to make to avoid DOS situations from malformed or malicious inputs.

How about: easy + common things should have tools built for them out-of-the-box, and complicated things should be offered a path to the bare metal.

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