David Leibs <david.le...@oracle.com> writes: > Hi Chris, > I get your point but I have really grown to dislike that phrase "Worse > is Better". Worse is never better. Worse is always worse and worse > never reduces to better under any set of natural rewrite rules. Yes > there are advantages in the short term to being first to market and > things that are worse can have more mindshare in the arena of public > opinion. > > "Worse is Better" sounds like some kind of apology to me. > > cheers, > -David Leibs
I don't see it as an apology, I use it as an insult. To me, "worse is better" is the answer to questions like "If SomeLanguage is so much better than C, why is everyone still using C?". The reason so many people use C is because so many people use C (and the same goes for Windows, multithreading, HTML, x86, etc.); there's a feedback loop. To describe something as "Worse is Better" , we're basically saying that this loop is more powerful than others'. One acceptable reason for this is because it got there first, which may mean it's lacking subsequent improvements, but it's not the end of the world. That's how progress is made, after all. One (IMHO) unacceptable reason for this is because of incompatibility. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is an example, where product A is open to compatibility but product B is not; B can offer compatibility with A, but A cannot offer compatibility with B, so everyone switches to B as the 'most compatible'. Another (IMHO) unacceptable reason is a deceptively low barrier to entry. As an example, in a course I took at university, multithreading in Java was introduced as 'just writing a class with a "run" method'. This is deceptive, since multithreading invalidates all kinds of assumptions which were safe to make in single-threaded Java code. This can make one technology look simpler and cheaper to invest in than another, when actually it has a large cost further down the line. By that point a project may be irrevocably invested in that technology. None of these are features, but they do explain why it's hard to replace incumbents. Hence if a technology's most compelling feature is 'Worse is Better', that's basically saying it has no compelling features. Cheers, Chris _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
