It was Alan Kay and the quote is “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible” and it wasn’t about any specific technology, it was a slogan for what they were building at PARC.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-Alan-Kay-s-ad...
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.
Re:Why We're Moving on from Firebase
by snovv_crash on Sunday October 16, 2022 @04:34AM
(#33222099)
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.
> 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).