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My problem with the slogan is that it has become a catch phrase for those who either haven't read the original article, or have read it and either have forgotte
by junke 8y ago
My problem with the slogan is that it has become a catch phrase for those who either haven't read the original article, or have read it and either have forgotten what it really talked about or never understood it in the first place. As a catch phrase, it is often used to justify shoddy design, or following the crowd rather than doing what is right, or as short-hand for the real claim that our customers are too stupid to either appreciate or deserve high quality products. Why spend the time doing things right, this line of reasoning goes, when we all know that worse is better. You are far better off giving the customer something that you know is less than what you could produce, because they (those simple customers) will think that it is better.
Worse is Worse (Jim Waldo)
https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807 https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807
- mmt 8y agoThat's just a summary of an interpretation of the original (a copy of which he links to): https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html (Be sure to copy-paste to avoid jwz's HN referer-trap) This line also appears just before that paragraph: > Of course, worse is better is a much catchier slogan than better depends on your goodness metric Ultimately, this seems to be applicable even to this discussion, where one goodness metric is "correctness" and another goodness metric is "expediency". In the original essay, it's simplicity of implementation rather than expediency, but I'm not sure that's all that huge a conceptual difference here (other than for the purposes of a slippery slope argument).