Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
--usually attributed to jwz in comp.lang.emacs

I had seen jwz's quote a few times, it's a very clever, and in the past week as I've been playing with a particularly nasty regex in Erlang I keep muttering to myself variations—"now I have nine problems" for example.

Today I threw the quote into Google and found this post over a year old by the guy who taught me regular expressions, the author of Mastering Regular Expressions Jeffrey Friedl.

In his post he tracks down the original quote and possible origins. Apparently it was recently on Reddit, and jwz himself makes an appearance in the comments.