(1991)
The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
21–30 of 351 posts
Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
#22I don’t get the name New Jersey approach, is it just the general association of New Jersey and poor quality? When I think of New Jersey and CS, I think of Princeton, which has a pretty good program IIRC. — Anyway, I wouldn’t put simplicity on the same level as the other things. Simplicity isn’t a virtue in and of itself, simplicity is valuable because it helps all of the other things. Simplicity helps a bit with cons…
New Jersey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs
Oh. Ok, that makes sense.
Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
#23I'll never understand the obsession with LISP. My guess is it just appeals to a certain type of person, sort of academic in my view. I'm not convinced that LISP was ever the-right-thing. The author didn't express anything about LISP vs C except to assert that C was a 50% solution and LISP was better. I agree though that for practical purposes, practical solutions are just going to be more successful.
How do you know someone knows lisp? They'll tell you. And tell you. And tell you...
I like lisp for the most part, but holy shit is the enduring dialog surrounding it the absolute worst part of the whole family of languages by far. No, it doesn't have or give you superpowers. Please grow up.
Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
#24For another discussion on this https://wiki.c2.com/?WorseIsBetter which starts out with:
RichardGabriel makes this observation on the survival value of software in the paper Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big. See http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html for the section on WorseIsBetter.
For those seeking the first node, see http://web.archive.org/web/19990210084721/http://www.ai.mit.edu/docs/articles/good-news/good-news.html.
For even more context on WorseIsBetter see http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html. My favorite part is RichardGabriel arguing with himself.Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
#25This... Honestly the first lines seemed I thought this was an arrogant take, but he made _really_ good point and now I tend to agree with him. Still I am a bit bothered, does a counterargument exist?
One counterargument is that people who claim "worse is better" are often making excuses for why their preferred technology didn't win.
Often in these arguments, worse means "shortcut" and better means "won". The difficulty is proving that not taking the shortcut had some other advantages that are assumed, like in the article.
Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
#26I'll never understand the obsession with LISP. My guess is it just appeals to a certain type of person, sort of academic in my view. I'm not convinced that LISP was ever the-right-thing. The author didn't express anything about LISP vs C except to assert that C was a 50% solution and LISP was better. I agree though that for practical purposes, practical solutions are just going to be more successful.
It’s a signaling mechanism to say “I went to MIT” or at the very least to say “I could have gone to MIT”.
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Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
#27I don’t get the name New Jersey approach, is it just the general association of New Jersey and poor quality? When I think of New Jersey and CS, I think of Princeton, which has a pretty good program IIRC. — Anyway, I wouldn’t put simplicity on the same level as the other things. Simplicity isn’t a virtue in and of itself, simplicity is valuable because it helps all of the other things. Simplicity helps a bit with cons…
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Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
#28looking at how it played out with javascript one can't but agree. (edit: I mean it unironically)
Yup first thing I thought. That pathetic piece of crap conceived in basically 15 days (not kidding)... BUT it is what we have on the front-end for web apps so there's that. JavaScript is the mediocre turd I love to hate.
And it keeps being polished and improved to the point it's almost not a turd, and now has types sort of, and much better engines, and now there are ARM machines that are literally designed to run it faster, and now most of your actual PC applications are written in it.
But honestly it's kind of refreshing to see the original node.js presentation, where using javascript is sort of a side-note. He wanted to use callback-heavy language and JS fit the bill
Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
#29I remember when I had a lesson about OSI layers, where the teacher has carefully described all the layers in detail
and then said something like "most of this is not important, these layers don't really exist, TCP/IP got popular first because it's just much simpler than OSI was"
Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
#30looking at how it played out with javascript one can't but agree. (edit: I mean it unironically)
JavaScript really illustrates the ultimate path-dependence of evolution. It got widely deployed during a boom time and therefore we are stuck with it forever.
We don’t have to be stuck with it forever. Start pushing WASM instead of React, etc. We can get there, but as technologists we have to make a concerted effort to do so.