purewater
Edit: looks like you already submitted the essay. Oh well. Good luck :)
Rob Pike has written multiple regular expression engines and at least 4 programming languages. I think he understands the efficiency part pretty well.
Please don't make offensive comments like, "I guess the algorithms course is no longer required at MIT?!"
With iterate and repair, people are using an internal heuristic to make a choice and refining that over time. These are not necessarily the locally optimal choice.
To run a regular expression, you have to search through the entire corpus.
Right now, when you type a search in, it searches through its index to look only through the top documents that match those words.
My guess is that it would be more like 1000000x slower.
Seriously, brush up your resume and apply to the major firms.
By the way, I should note that cost of living and taxes are much higher here. Standard rent is >$2k (which is nothing compared to some parts of NYC, I guess...)
Sorry, I won't mention any particular companies, but if you're close to anyone at a major software firm, you should easily be able to find out what it's like.
Washington D.C. Avg Software Engineer salary: 102k http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Software-Engineer-l-Washingto...
Bay Area Avg Software Engineer salary: 113k http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Software-Engineer-Bay-Area-l-...
Except none of my friends in the bay area make that little. In fact, few of my friends in their late 20s are making under $200k a year in terms of what they write on their tax returns (total compensation package).
Your experience and the "average" typically are not comparable.