> That's an interesting counter-take and it makes me wonder if Rust isn't a third thing... not the clean sparse MIT approach but also not the wild YOLO slop of C and Unix. Something correct but also complex and pragmatic.
I had supposed this in a previous thread, and I agree it is another thing entirely, however whether Rust is 'correct' or 'pragmatic', I think is a matter of contention.
> (1) Worse is free -- the "worse" stuff tended to be less encumbered by patents and closed source / copyrights. This is particularly true after GNU, BSD, and Linux. Free stuff is viral. It spreads fast and overtakes everything else.
At the time it seems that the "worse" stuff was actually more encumbered--GNU started to exist as a consequence of Unix both becoming an industry standard and solidifying the position of nonfree software in industry, and it didn't get that way by being free--they simply licensed it away en masse to universities. The free software movement was born out of the MIT hacker ethic of sharing software freely (GNU brought the design philosophy of MIT to Unix systems, and largely stands opposed to the "worse is better" approach. It originally sought to replace parts of Unix with superior alternatives, such as Info over man pages). BSD didn't become free until much, much later, at which point Linux had already become relevant.
> (2) Programmers like to show off, and "worse" provides more opportunities to revel in complexity and cleverness.
I think maybe C or C++ lets you show off by hacking around the compiler to do certain things that look impressive like preprocessor hacks or obfuscated code, but I think many would agree that this kind of style isn't "correct": languages like Go were developed as a consequence of this in order to suck any and all fun you might get out of hacking C, in order to force you to write more "correct" programs. Lisp, on the contrary doesn't tell you what a correct or incorrect program is, and gives you every facility to write programs that are infinitely complex and clever.
To me, Rust looks like the result of trying to break the rules of industry languages, by trying to incorporate things like real macros and type systems into something that resembles a real-world language. But it's biggest flaw to me is that it doesn't break enough of them, rather it makes more in the process.