4 ms·

More like "worse" selected with survivorship bias is "better." The fact that block journaling happened to paper over a design flaw in PC hardware, was a comple

• Tuna-Fish 4y ago
  It's not survivorship bias when you do selection. ext2 was not the only FS type available on Linux. As always with Linux, there was this wide variety of more or less off-the-wall choices. ext2 and it's lineage stuck with us because people started thinking that it was the one least likely to eat your data. The fact that ext2 happened upon a technical decision that worked well with cheap hardware was luck, the fact that ext2 ended up as the "default" file system on Linux was not.
  • mike_hock 4y ago
    No, but the "worse" technical decision survived because it turned out to be "better" out of sheer luck. If it hadn't, they would have found a fix for ext2 or we would have gotten ext3 sooner, or we would have gotten a different default FS. (Survival of the "bad" decision, not the FS itself, at least not necessarily.)
• kqr 4y ago
  Intentionally exploiting selection is sort of the point of "worse is better" as a design strategy. By promising fewer things in the design, you can get software in front of users faster, and you find out sooner what works well and what does not.