The quote continues, "The New Jersey guy said that the Unix solution was right because the design philosophy of Unix was simplicity and that the right thing was

The quote continues, "The New Jersey guy said that the Unix solution was right because the design philosophy of Unix was simplicity and that the right thing was too complex. Besides, programmers could easily insert this extra test and loop. The MIT guy pointed out that the implementation was simple but the interface to the functionality was complex. The New Jersey guy said that the right tradeoff has been selected in Unix-namely, implementation simplicity was more important than interface simplicity. " As I see it, too many people abuse / misunderstand "worse is better". "Worse" might be better than "perfect" in some cases, but "perfect" is better than "crap", and "trying to be worse" usually results in "crap" whereas "trying to be perfect" usually results in "worse". Even in the above example, the MIT guy pointed out that the simple implementation results in a complex interface, and undoubtedly much much more time was wasted in the end.