Lots of things get invented / discovered multiple times when it's in the air. But just because Newton (or Leibnitz) existed, doesn't mean Leibnitz (or Newton) were any less visionary.

For your very specific question: have a look at the sorry state of what's called 'regular expressions' many programming languages and libraries to see what programmers left loose can do. (Most of these 'regular expressions' add things like back-references etc that make matching their franken-'xpressions take exponential time in the worst case; but they neglect to put in stuff like intersection or complement of expressions, which are matchable in linear time.