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The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

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Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#101

Post by warkdarrior »

busterarm wrote: post #72
djha-skin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually take this as evidence that Rust will always remain niche. It's just a very complicated language. Go or Zig is much easier to learn and reason about. In Go you can immediately tell what the fields are in a config yaml file just by looking at struct annotations. Try doing that with Rust's Serde. Super opaque in my opinion.

Exactly! Rust will only protect me from things my customers don't care about and don't understand. By not using Rust and just dealing with it, I'm making more money faster than if I started with Rust. Rust only matters in environments where that calculus comes out the other way.

> Rust will only protect me from things my customers don't care about and don't understand.

That's the wrong kind of protection. Rust should protect you from things people other than your customers (who presumably are well behaved) care about.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#102

Post by circlefavshape »

dkarl wrote: post #85
hammock wrote: post #43

There was an article posted on here[1] a while back that I only just found again, introducing the term "expedience." The idea was that we think we live in a world where people have to have "the best" sweater, be on "the best" social network, drive "the best" car, etc. But when you look at what really WINS, it's not the best, it's the most "expedient" - i.e. sufficiently good, with built-in social proof, inoculated of…

"Expedient" is a common (or at least not rare) English word that means something like "practical and effective even if not directly attending to higher or deeper considerations." For example, if two students in a class are having frequent confrontations that bring learning in the class to a halt, and attempts by teachers and counselors to address their conflict directly haven't been effective, the expedient solution…

> For example, if we solve climate change with geoengineering instead of by addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability, many people would feel frustrated or let down by the solution because it would solve the problem without addressing the moral shortcomings that led to the problem.

Oof. Now I understand something I didn't before

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#103

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

pjmlp wrote: post #77
pjc50 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> things like garbage collection, message-passing object-orientation, generics, rich sets of conditionals, first-class functions, etc. were brand spanking new. They were The Right Thing to do I quite like this view, because these things have clearly been copied everywhere such as my language of choice C#, but the one thing that nobody copied is the one that Lisp programmers rave about most: homoiconicity (brackets ev…

Lisp-2, Prolog, Dylan, Erlang, Julia, R.... Are all homoiconic without being full of parenthesis all over the place, the actual meaning is code and data being interchangeable.

I think following what's written in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity#Implementation_m...) and only using the adjective for stuff like Lisp, Tcl, Rebol is better than diluting its meaning to the point where it applies to any language with tree-sitter bindings and a parser.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#104

Post by lisper »

hammock wrote: post #43

There was an article posted on here[1] a while back that I only just found again, introducing the term "expedience." The idea was that we think we live in a world where people have to have "the best" sweater, be on "the best" social network, drive "the best" car, etc. But when you look at what really WINS, it's not the best, it's the most "expedient" - i.e. sufficiently good, with built-in social proof, inoculated of…

> Is Amazon "the best" place to go shopping? No, you might find better prices on individual items if you put a little more work into it, but it's the most expedient.

It's not just that. Every time you do business with a new web site you assume additional risk. Amazon is a known quantity. You can be pretty sure that they are not going to outright scam you, and they aren't going to be hacked by script kiddies. There is a significant risk of getting a counterfeit item, but they have a very liberal return policy, so the real cost to you in this case is a minute or two to get a return code and possibly a trip to the nearest Whole Foods to drop it off.

Amazon sucks in many ways, but at least their suckage is a known quantity. Predictability has significant value.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#105

Post by kragen »

anthk wrote: post #96
kragen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paper was written in 01991. Garbage collection is from 01959. Message-passing (aka object-orientation) is from 01972. C is from 01973. If by "generics" you mean parametric polymorphism, those were added to Ada and C++ in the mid-80s, after having been invented in ML in 01973; in a sense they're an attempt to bring the virtues of dynamically-typed languages like Lisp to statically-typed languages. Even today, I d…

Ever used SBCL?

I love SBCL. Does Python optimize with parametric polymorphism now?

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#106

Post by kragen »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #103
pjmlp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisp-2, Prolog, Dylan, Erlang, Julia, R.... Are all homoiconic without being full of parenthesis all over the place, the actual meaning is code and data being interchangeable.

I think following what's written in Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity#Implementation_m... ) and only using the adjective for stuff like Lisp, Tcl, Rebol is better than diluting its meaning to the point where it applies to any language with tree-sitter bindings and a parser.

Prolog, Dylan, Julia, and R are stuff like Lisp, Tcl, and Rebol. I don't know about Erlang, and I don't know what pjmlp means by "Lisp-2", which I normally interpret as meaning a Lisp with different namespaces for functions and variables, following Steele's terminology.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#107

Post by sophacles »

pjc50 wrote: post #60
Der_Einzige wrote: post #16

I know this is an article about Lisp and the specific usage of this term in the context of software acceptance, but when you use a title that provocative I want to speak specifically about the idea of "Worse is Better" with respect to a more literal idea of "sometimes things get worse overtime but you are told they have improved" For example, why is it that central vacuums are more rare in 2024 than they were in the…

What the heck is a central vaccum? One plumbed into the house? Isn't that spectacularly expensive?

> Isn't that spectacularly expensive?

Not spectacularly expensive when installed as the house is built. It's another run of pvc pipe in the walls before you close them up. Approx a day of labor and some pipe are the added expense - not much in terms of house building cost at all. Hardwood floors are much more expensive - and still need to be swept or vacuumed.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#108

Post by kragen »

pjmlp wrote: post #90
kragen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BLISS-11 didn't do bounds-checking either. VMS was my favorite operating system until I got access to a Unix. People chose Unix because it was better—and not just by a little. Handicapping Unix wouldn't have improved the alternative systems.

VMS also supported Pascal and BASIC dialects for systems programming, in equal footing to BLISS. People choose free beer, it always goes even if warm.

VAX Pascal is viable for systems programming (though standard Pascal wasn't). I only ever used VAX BASIC a tiny bit; was it interpreted like microcomputer BASICs? That made BASIC a nonstarter for "serious software" in the 80s. Not having records, local variables, or subroutine parameters was also a pretty big problem, but maybe VAX BASIC fixed that.

I wasn't paying for access to VMS either; it just didn't hold a candle to Unix.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#109

Post by anthk »

pjmlp wrote: post #74
kqr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not convinced that LISP was ever the-right-thing. Remember that this has to be read in historical context. At the time C was invented, things like garbage collection, message-passing object-orientation, generics, rich sets of conditionals, first-class functions, etc. were brand spanking new. They were The Right Thing to do (even judged in the harsh light of hindsight), but also quite complicated to implement –…

Also Lisp came out in 1958, and ESPOL/NEWP in 1961, PL/I and its derivates, predating C by a decade. Had AT&T been allowed to charge real money for UNIX, and the Worse is Better would never happened.

Imagine if RMS brought Lisp OS with Emacs not being bound to GNU/Unix. JITted Emacs since the 2000 and Eshell as the default CLI, with a floating WM as an easy desktop. Multithreaded, own modules for images/PDF and whatever. No need for security, daily backups and rollbacks would be granted. Today you would be 'rewinding in time' from Emacs if any attack happened.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#110

Post by api »

actionfromafar wrote: post #36
Der_Einzige wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I feel like other languages that we were de-facto "stuck with" in certain domains boomed and then busted - i.e. Lua, Pearl, etc

Javascript is the only language which straddled the Client Server Gap. If it weren't for Node, Javascript would not have been as popular.

There was something long ago called GWT -- Google Web Toolkit -- that tried to make Java into that language by having it compile to JavaScript.

It actually worked decently well, but was due to Java needlessly verbose.

WASM lets us run other languages efficiently in the browser but that just opens the field to a lot of languages, not one language to rule them all.

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