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The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

dreamsongs.com

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Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#61

Post by djha-skin »

adamnemecek wrote: post #19
NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #11

I'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”.

I learned Racket at Brigham Young University in Utah, and Clojure, then Common Lisp on my own. I don't think it's just an MIT thing. It's in the ethos now. Lots of people know about SICP, for example.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#62

Post by hammock »

The distinction between the set of five "right" principles and the five "worse is better" principles is known as compromise in design.

It's the opposite of what marketers want you to think of when they say "uncompromising design."

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#63

Post by bbor »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #11

I'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 for the dreamers. The crazy ones among us that do not think of themselves as experts in programming machines to solve business problems, but rather novices in cajoling machines to think like humans do.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#64

Post by hammock »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #57
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 a Tesla (perhaps outdated example since X) "the best" car - no, but it is the most expedient. The most expedient car? Or BEV in the US?

Fair point... it was a coastal California-centric point but there is plenty of nuance or adjustment to be made. At some point in the 90's we'd probably have said "Silver E class Mercedes" is the most expedient luxury sedan, if you wanted a different example.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#65

Post by tialaramex »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #25
orwin wrote: post #6

This... 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.

Winning is temporary. In 1900 Britain has an empire for example. Colonialism won right? The battleship, answering machines, VHS, the compact disk, steam engines.

This "victory" is fleeting. When people people tell you C++, a language which didn't even exist when I was born, is "forever" they are merely betraying the same lack of perspective as when Britain thought its Empire would last forever.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#66

Post by Feathercrown »

orwin wrote: post #6

This... 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?

I think the counterargument is that something being easy to proliferate doesn't mean that it's good.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#67

Post by arethuza »

pjc50 wrote: post #41
NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #11

I'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.

Over the years I've developed what I call the "lefthanded scissors" analogy: people assume that everyone's mind is wired the same way and that all good programmers are good in the same way and think in the same way, but what if that's not true? What if different people have a predisposition (like lefthandedness) to prefer different tools? Then a righthanded person picks up the lefthanded scissors and deems them weird…

I've seen Common Lisp source code that I didn't even recognise as Common Lisp because of over-enthusiastic use of reader macros...

Edit: I should also mention that once I worked out how reader macros worked I went on to enthusiastically (ab)use them for my own ends...

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#68

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #11

I'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.

See these demos for the kinds of interactive systems LISP enabled back in the day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU

It makes working on VSCode today look like banging rocks together, let alone 30 years ago.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#69

Post by jes5199 »

ripap wrote: post #12
orwin wrote: post #6

This... 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?

Worse is Better is Worse: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf Same author (name is an anagram).

the name also seems to be a reference to another pseudonym, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
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