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I respectfully disagree. "Worse is better" originally applied to the Bell Labs Unix efforts vs the Lisp Machine efforts at MIT and elsewhere. Unix didn't get "
by cpr 16y ago
I respectfully disagree. "Worse is better" originally applied to the Bell Labs Unix efforts vs the Lisp Machine efforts at MIT and elsewhere.
Unix didn't get "fixed" later.
- silentbicycle 16y agoActually, I think you're right - Javascript was frozen very early and Unix had a while to develop, but the same forces (competing commercial implementations) locked in minor errors in Unix as well. I'd say Unix got more of its warts fixed than JS did, but that's only a difference of degree. Mainly: The whole "Worse is Better" thing works better when you don't get stuck maintaining reverse compatibility with your early releases.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoI'd say Unix and C have more warts, and more serious warts, than Javascript does. But we have come to accept those warts in Unix and C as "the way things are" whereas we generally perceive javascripts warts as such. Arguably the decision to use null-terminated strings in C in order to save one or two bytes of memory per string is an error of much greater than Y2K proportions that we are still paying for.
- silentbicycle 16y agoAgreed, though I think most of Unix's serious warts are actually C's. They're synergistic, though.
- silentbicycle 16y ago(Oops: I meant 'symbiotic'.)
- jrockway 16y agoUnix didn't get "fixed" later. When did Unix get fixed?
- silentbicycle 16y agoYou need to be pun-ished.