5 ms·

I suspect the "Worse is Better" essay has caused untold harm. It is written from the standpoint of a purist offended that the world doesn't appreciate purity, c

by ncmncm 5y ago

I suspect the "Worse is Better" essay has caused untold harm. It is written from the standpoint of a purist offended that the world doesn't appreciate purity, complaining that the things people end up using are built by pragmatic people. The lesson seems to be that doing things better is punished. But that is the wrong lesson. The correct lesson is that the real world is not obliged to conform to your personal model of "better". You have a personal obligation to continuously adapt your model to match the real world. This is the model of science, and is opposed to Platonism. After you have adjusted your model, it is certain to still not be right, and need further adjustment. Usually "the world" you are obliged to adjust to has its own problems. There are powerful forces making us favor accommodating a Microsoft execution environment, even though that execution environment has always been a cesspit. It represents its own poor abstraction. Posix file system semantics are another example. Von Neumann architecture and the C abstract machine are not the only, or best way to organize computational resources. It is important to recognize when somebody else's pragmatic failure threatens to taint your own models. Lisp, RG's hobbyhorse, didn't get sidelined because of Philistines. Lisp turned out not to be better, despite how strongly RG felt about it. Instead of figuring out what about Lisp was not right, he called things that were, along axes that matter, more right "worse", preserving his personal model and lessening readers' ability to reason about merit.

recursivedoubts 5y ago
I don't agree at all. I think he was able to give a clear and accurate analysis of why lisp failed, despite liking the language so much. He also wrote critical responses to his own essay under a pseudonym, with a back and forth that is quite funny and demonstrates the ability to understand both sides of the argument. In "Worse is better" he explicitly mentions how that approach favors real-world application, because it is so simple it is fast and is "good enough" and then can be moved to 90% of the right thing. All of this is to say: I don't agree with you, but I also agree with you and I suspect he would as well, with qualifications. And he would probably also disagree with you.
- fileeditview 5y ago
  Perfect user name! Also this was my comment of the day.. nay week at least!
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Not buying it. He still says "worse" and still writes "90%". What he means is "not conforming to my personal value system". He is dodging the crucial step of discovering how his personal value system got so off-kilter as to lead him to wrong choices, and fixing it.
marcosdumay 5y ago
The essay is funny. Lisp machines were clearly abandoned because of their price. Every time I find some history about someone that actually made that decision, the reasoning was exactly alike, those machines costed more to keep than the Unix ones to install, and were less capable due to outdated hardware. Yet the essay goes all over the place, citing time to market (that was completely irrelevant, UNIX was the newcomer, Lisp machines were there already), university-based prejudice (yet every single one decided the same at around the same time), and blaming the user. The essay doesn't even talk about money.
- kragen 5y ago
  It would probably help you to understand the essay if you knew that it was written by Richard P. Gabriel, the head of Lucid, the leading competitor to Lisp machines. His company's product was a Lisp system that ran on Unix machines. What he's personally best known for (aside from this essay) is showing that smarter Lisp compilers on commodity hardware like a 68020 or a SPARC could deliver performance that first equaled, then exceeded the performance available from custom silicon; the book he published on this subject was so rigorous that many of the tests in it are still used today for judging the performance of implementations of high-level languages such as LuaJIT and V8. You seem to think he was advocating Lisp machines, scoffing at his essay based on that misconception. But if there was a single person in history who worked hardest to destroy Lisp machines, it was probably RPG.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    > worked hardest to destroy Lisp machines ...or worked hardest to turn ALL machines into Lisp machines! ;)
    - lispm 5y ago
      Yeah, that's more like it. RPG worked a lot to bring sophisticated Lisp to UNIX systems. He worked on bringing a standard OOP system to Lisp (incl. Lisp Machines, where Lucid (and he personally) collaborated with Xerox PARC and Symbolics to develop CLOS as a part of the ANSI Common Lisp standard). Then he tried to develop and market similar technology in the form of a databased-backed incremental C++ development system for UNIX (called Energize). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk He hoped that the market for C++ environments was larger than the shrinking Lisp market and that C++ developers would want an interactive system with integrated code management in an object store. That did not went well.
r-bryan 5y ago
There is an unfortunate fallacy here. Your notion "the real world" conflates the physical world with a social milieu. The physical world is (at this scale) immutable, so of course we must conform to it and update our science-like models. But there is no absolute requirement to conform oneself to a social milieu. A social milieu changes. It can be altered. It supports a vast number of models. And milieus overlap so densely that one can just go play somewhere else. Disclosure: I used to be a Lisp bigot, but I got better.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Agreed it is complicated. We have the principles of physics and computational irreducibility, then physical realization of state-machine designs to exploit those principles, then social conventions around what is valued, languages influenced by conventions, operating environments for programs in them, and finally actual code in those languages. What makes a "better" Lisp program differs from what makes a "better" C++ or Rust program. Besides fitness for purpose, there is maintainability, energy cost to execute, and results per unit time. What did you learn coding it? Can it be the basis for something more ambitious? Is it secure, deadlock-proof? Are its results accurate, aesthetically pleasing, generative of insight? We can get mired in detail, obscuring important truths. We talk about performance a lot, not because we are obsessive, but because it is a measure that is hard to fake. A faster program says something fundamental about how your computational resources are being directed to the target results. We can be misled by details of realizations of computation. What is fast on a PDP-11 is not necessarily fast on a Ryzen 5. But submitting to the rigors of performance for the best machines we have is a discipline that connects us, howsoever imperfectly, to the physical principles of computation. It destroys illusion: if a variation seems like it ought to be faster, but is actually slower, there is no sugar-coating the fact. Hewing to physical performance enforces a kind of honesty we don't get any other way.
kragen 5y ago
This will sound crazy from our perspective this year, but from the perspective of the essay 31 years ago, Lisp dominates software development today; we just spell it without parentheses. The top ten languages in https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ right now are Python, C, Java, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JS, assembly, SQL, and PHP. Of these, the "dialects of Lisp" include Python, Java, C#, VB, JS, and PHP. Remember that in 01991 all "serious" modern software was either C, C++, Pascal, or assembly. BASIC, whose only data structures were the string and the array, was for amateurs or the MIS department, which mostly used COBOL, assembly, and JCL. Fortran was established but was considered antiquated (except by supercomputer people) and didn't have pointers. If we compare these languages on the points pg lists in http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html, the earliest versions of Lisp score 9/9, Python is 7/9, Java is 7/9, C# and VB are Java with different syntax, JS is 7/9, and PHP is 5/9. By contrast, C is 2/9, C++ is 3/9, Pascal is 3/9, assembly is 0/9, COBOL is 0/9, Fortran 77 is 1/9. You can quibble a bit about these numbers (do Pascal procedure parameters qualify as "a function type" even though you can't store them in variables? Does the Python expression "intern(s) is foo" qualify as "a symbol type"?) but the broad division is very clear. I think it was in the conversation where he originally wrote that essay that Guy Steele said of his own work on Java that they had managed to drag all the C++ programmers kicking and screaming about halfway to Common Lisp, so we should be happy. I've lost my archives from that time, so I can't be sure. In terms of syntax, Python or Java have nothing in common with Lisp. But in terms of the issues you raise — accommodating a Microsoft execution environment, POSIX filesystem semantics, the Von Neumann architecture, the C abstract machine, or just the tools they give you to analyze problems — they're just dialects of Lisp with slightly different syntax (and more hair on eval, and sort of broken symbols or no symbols). In terms of "worse is better" of course Python and C# lean just as hard on "worse" as C does. If we restrict the sense of "Lisp" to languages with S-expression syntax like Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp, Scheme, and Arc, then Lisp did fail to (at least) become popular — but it's plain to see that when people abandoned Common Lisp and Scheme, they were mostly moving to languages like Python and JS which adopted Lisp's most appealing ideas, not to C++. I also think r-bryan's point in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31346478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31346478 is true, beautiful, deep, and merits quoting: > Your notion "the real world" conflates the physical world with a social milieu. The physical world is (at this scale) immutable, so of course we must conform to it… > But there is no absolute requirement to conform oneself to a social milieu. A social milieu changes. It can be altered. It supports a vast number of models. And milieus overlap so densely that one can just go play somewhere else. In that vein, it's worth noting that Linux got pretty far before it ever had to accommodate a Microsoft execution environment, though I did have coworkers in 01997 who thought I was hopelessly unhip for preferring Unix (which they thought of as antiquated) to Microsoft Windows.
CRConrad 5y ago
> The correct lesson is that the real world is not obliged to conform to your personal model of "better". (Annoying as fuck, that. ;-) And that seems to indicate that a(n initially) half-assed, but improvable, model of it that is then iterated upon is a good way to build one's model. Feels to me like that is exactly what "Worse is Better" is about -- shouldn't your beef here rather be with "the MIT model"? > You have a personal obligation to continuously adapt your model to match the real world. A bit hard to get a consensus model out of that, since everyone's perception of the real world -- heck, everyone's actual "real world" -- varies. > This is the model of science, and is opposed to Platonism. Again, what feels like setting up a Platonic ideal to me is more "the MIT model", rather than "Worse is Better". > After you have adjusted your model, it is certain to still not be right, and need further adjustment. Ah, dangit, at some point you just gotta say "Screw it, good enough!" (See, for instance, "The saddest 'Just ship it!' story" the other day.) [Edit: Reduced repetitive weasel wording.]

by ncmncm 5y ago

recursivedoubts 5y ago

I don't agree at all. I think he was able to give a clear and accurate analysis of why lisp failed, despite liking the language so much. He also wrote critical responses to his own essay under a pseudonym, with a back and forth that is quite funny and demonstrates the ability to understand both sides of the argument. In "Worse is better" he explicitly mentions how that approach favors real-world application, because it is so simple it is fast and is "good enough" and then can be moved to 90% of the right thing. All of this is to say: I don't agree with you, but I also agree with you and I suspect he would as well, with qualifications. And he would probably also disagree with you.

fileeditview 5y ago
Perfect user name! Also this was my comment of the day.. nay week at least!
ncmncm 5y ago
Not buying it. He still says "worse" and still writes "90%". What he means is "not conforming to my personal value system". He is dodging the crucial step of discovering how his personal value system got so off-kilter as to lead him to wrong choices, and fixing it.

marcosdumay 5y ago

The essay is funny. Lisp machines were clearly abandoned because of their price. Every time I find some history about someone that actually made that decision, the reasoning was exactly alike, those machines costed more to keep than the Unix ones to install, and were less capable due to outdated hardware. Yet the essay goes all over the place, citing time to market (that was completely irrelevant, UNIX was the newcomer, Lisp machines were there already), university-based prejudice (yet every single one decided the same at around the same time), and blaming the user. The essay doesn't even talk about money.

kragen 5y ago
It would probably help you to understand the essay if you knew that it was written by Richard P. Gabriel, the head of Lucid, the leading competitor to Lisp machines. His company's product was a Lisp system that ran on Unix machines. What he's personally best known for (aside from this essay) is showing that smarter Lisp compilers on commodity hardware like a 68020 or a SPARC could deliver performance that first equaled, then exceeded the performance available from custom silicon; the book he published on this subject was so rigorous that many of the tests in it are still used today for judging the performance of implementations of high-level languages such as LuaJIT and V8. You seem to think he was advocating Lisp machines, scoffing at his essay based on that misconception. But if there was a single person in history who worked hardest to destroy Lisp machines, it was probably RPG.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  > worked hardest to destroy Lisp machines ...or worked hardest to turn ALL machines into Lisp machines! ;)
  - lispm 5y ago
    Yeah, that's more like it. RPG worked a lot to bring sophisticated Lisp to UNIX systems. He worked on bringing a standard OOP system to Lisp (incl. Lisp Machines, where Lucid (and he personally) collaborated with Xerox PARC and Symbolics to develop CLOS as a part of the ANSI Common Lisp standard). Then he tried to develop and market similar technology in the form of a databased-backed incremental C++ development system for UNIX (called Energize). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk He hoped that the market for C++ environments was larger than the shrinking Lisp market and that C++ developers would want an interactive system with integrated code management in an object store. That did not went well.

r-bryan 5y ago

There is an unfortunate fallacy here. Your notion "the real world" conflates the physical world with a social milieu. The physical world is (at this scale) immutable, so of course we must conform to it and update our science-like models. But there is no absolute requirement to conform oneself to a social milieu. A social milieu changes. It can be altered. It supports a vast number of models. And milieus overlap so densely that one can just go play somewhere else. Disclosure: I used to be a Lisp bigot, but I got better.

ncmncm 5y ago
Agreed it is complicated. We have the principles of physics and computational irreducibility, then physical realization of state-machine designs to exploit those principles, then social conventions around what is valued, languages influenced by conventions, operating environments for programs in them, and finally actual code in those languages. What makes a "better" Lisp program differs from what makes a "better" C++ or Rust program. Besides fitness for purpose, there is maintainability, energy cost to execute, and results per unit time. What did you learn coding it? Can it be the basis for something more ambitious? Is it secure, deadlock-proof? Are its results accurate, aesthetically pleasing, generative of insight? We can get mired in detail, obscuring important truths. We talk about performance a lot, not because we are obsessive, but because it is a measure that is hard to fake. A faster program says something fundamental about how your computational resources are being directed to the target results. We can be misled by details of realizations of computation. What is fast on a PDP-11 is not necessarily fast on a Ryzen 5. But submitting to the rigors of performance for the best machines we have is a discipline that connects us, howsoever imperfectly, to the physical principles of computation. It destroys illusion: if a variation seems like it ought to be faster, but is actually slower, there is no sugar-coating the fact. Hewing to physical performance enforces a kind of honesty we don't get any other way.

kragen 5y ago

This will sound crazy from our perspective this year, but from the perspective of the essay 31 years ago, Lisp dominates software development today; we just spell it without parentheses. The top ten languages in https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ right now are Python, C, Java, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JS, assembly, SQL, and PHP. Of these, the "dialects of Lisp" include Python, Java, C#, VB, JS, and PHP. Remember that in 01991 all "serious" modern software was either C, C++, Pascal, or assembly. BASIC, whose only data structures were the string and the array, was for amateurs or the MIS department, which mostly used COBOL, assembly, and JCL. Fortran was established but was considered antiquated (except by supercomputer people) and didn't have pointers. If we compare these languages on the points pg lists in http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html, the earliest versions of Lisp score 9/9, Python is 7/9, Java is 7/9, C# and VB are Java with different syntax, JS is 7/9, and PHP is 5/9. By contrast, C is 2/9, C++ is 3/9, Pascal is 3/9, assembly is 0/9, COBOL is 0/9, Fortran 77 is 1/9. You can quibble a bit about these numbers (do Pascal procedure parameters qualify as "a function type" even though you can't store them in variables? Does the Python expression "intern(s) is foo" qualify as "a symbol type"?) but the broad division is very clear. I think it was in the conversation where he originally wrote that essay that Guy Steele said of his own work on Java that they had managed to drag all the C++ programmers kicking and screaming about halfway to Common Lisp, so we should be happy. I've lost my archives from that time, so I can't be sure. In terms of syntax, Python or Java have nothing in common with Lisp. But in terms of the issues you raise — accommodating a Microsoft execution environment, POSIX filesystem semantics, the Von Neumann architecture, the C abstract machine, or just the tools they give you to analyze problems — they're just dialects of Lisp with slightly different syntax (and more hair on eval, and sort of broken symbols or no symbols). In terms of "worse is better" of course Python and C# lean just as hard on "worse" as C does. If we restrict the sense of "Lisp" to languages with S-expression syntax like Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp, Scheme, and Arc, then Lisp did fail to (at least) become popular — but it's plain to see that when people abandoned Common Lisp and Scheme, they were mostly moving to languages like Python and JS which adopted Lisp's most appealing ideas, not to C++. I also think r-bryan's point in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31346478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31346478 is true, beautiful, deep, and merits quoting: > Your notion "the real world" conflates the physical world with a social milieu. The physical world is (at this scale) immutable, so of course we must conform to it… > But there is no absolute requirement to conform oneself to a social milieu. A social milieu changes. It can be altered. It supports a vast number of models. And milieus overlap so densely that one can just go play somewhere else. In that vein, it's worth noting that Linux got pretty far before it ever had to accommodate a Microsoft execution environment, though I did have coworkers in 01997 who thought I was hopelessly unhip for preferring Unix (which they thought of as antiquated) to Microsoft Windows.

CRConrad 5y ago

> The correct lesson is that the real world is not obliged to conform to your personal model of "better". (Annoying as fuck, that. ;-) And that seems to indicate that a(n initially) half-assed, but improvable, model of it that is then iterated upon is a good way to build one's model. Feels to me like that is exactly what "Worse is Better" is about -- shouldn't your beef here rather be with "the MIT model"? > You have a personal obligation to continuously adapt your model to match the real world. A bit hard to get a consensus model out of that, since everyone's perception of the real world -- heck, everyone's actual "real world" -- varies. > This is the model of science, and is opposed to Platonism. Again, what feels like setting up a Platonic ideal to me is more "the MIT model", rather than "Worse is Better". > After you have adjusted your model, it is certain to still not be right, and need further adjustment. Ah, dangit, at some point you just gotta say "Screw it, good enough!" (See, for instance, "The saddest 'Just ship it!' story" the other day.) [Edit: Reduced repetitive weasel wording.]