source via HackerNews.
In this essay, Richard P. Gabriel coins the phrase “worse is better”, which has embedded itself in programmer parlance.
In the essay, Gabriel identifies two style of design:
Gabriel argues that the New Jersey approach has better survival characteristics than the MIT/Stanford approach. He uses UNIX and C as examples of how the worse-is-better approach led to highly impactful software that couldn’t easily be replaced. Actually, his phrasing was delightfully pejorative. He called them both viruses. By contrast, he uses Scheme and Common Lisp as examples of “the right thing” and concludes the last %20 takes %80 of the effort.
Gabriel concludes with:
The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to %90 of the right thing.
A wrong lesson is to take the parable literally and to conclude that C is the right vehicle for AI software. The %50 solution has to be basically right and in this case it isn’t.
The compelling parts of Gabriels arguments are in the case studies, but they are already pretty short. Instead of repeating them here, read the essay.
Side note: I love the kind of whimsical storytelling that can include a line like this:
The MIT guy then muttered that sometimes it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, but the New Jersey guy didn’t understand (I’m not sure I do either).