[harpocrates]

The comments from the original post[1] of this are still quite relevant. I feel like I've seen this link posted here several times (much more recently than 2009), but I can't find the links.

  [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466845

[kbenson]

There's been good discussion quite a few of the times this has been posted. Check the "past" link below the submission info at the top for a quick search of all the submissions.

[username223]

Yeah, Russ Cox ranted about pattern matching libraries a decade ago, ignoring the fact that they were already doing things far more complex than formal regular expression matching. In the decade since, that hasn't changed.