It is easy to produce very brittle code by assuming a premise that allows one to rationalize being clever.
Or as the British sometimes say “too clever by half.”
I just picked three words I fancied at the time I was illustrating my point. Not random, but not because -ex was important. The language game I was playing was writing an HN comment for amusement.
The finite state machine of my regular expression has one fewer nodes than yours. If that ain’t simpler it will do until simpler shows up.
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? — Brian Kernighan
