It was better the first couple hundred times I heard it.

Jamie Zawinski's from 1997 is the most famous in modern times:

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

But, it dates back even further to a "D. Tilbrook" from before 1988:

"Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use AWK.' Now, they have two problems."

There's an XML variant that had quite a lot of popularity in the early 00's.

It's funny because they're all accurate. XML is an ugly beast, regular expressions can be amazingly obfuscated. I don't know about AWK, but I'm guessing that it's as ugly as Perl.

Brian Kernighan created Awk. And who are you again?

You've misunderstood the fundamental UNIX nature of these quotes. They are said by people who use the tools in question regularly. jwz doesn't avoid regular expressions for everything (he'd be a fool to do so, and he's no fool)...he's merely pointing out that regexes can be misused, and often are. Likewise Awk.

By cloistering yourself into Lisp, and nothing but, you're missing out on years of aggregate wisdom from some of the smartest people in computing. Lisp is one of those really valuable pieces of wisdom. But it is not the only one, or even the most important. Deny yourself the rest of the history of computing, and you are doomed to reimplement it...and you'll almost certainly do it poorly.

AWK is no where near as complicated as perl. It'll probably take someone 1/2 hour to figure it out.

This applies more to lisp than perl. More likely to be unemployed if you only know lisp. Not many companies use lisp. A lot of them use perl (though this is changing to ruby and python).