The Old New Thing

Solving one problem by creating a bigger problem

March 22, 2006 Mar 22, 2006 03/22/06

Raymond Chen

Often, people will not even realize that their solution to a problem merely replaces it with another problem. The quip attributed to Jamie Zawinski captures the sentiment: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. For example, in response to "How do I write a ...