Reminds me an old story from Steve Yegge: I gave him the "find the phone numbers in 50,000 html files" question, and he decided to write a huge program with an

Reminds me an old story from Steve Yegge: I gave him the "find the phone numbers in 50,000 html files" question, and he decided to write a huge program with an ad-hoc state machine. When I asked how long it would take to write the program, he said he'd have to hit N files, with M lines per file, so... I interrupted him: no, WRITE. How long to WRITE the program? Oh. He estimated it at 5 days of work. At this point I was 50% ready to throw him out.