3 ms·

I have a theory that the worse is better approach begets an environment where the worse is better approach is better. At least hypothetically, I think there's

I have a theory that the worse is better approach begets an environment where the worse is better approach is better. At least hypothetically, I think there's an approach which is not "the right thing" or "worse is better" but rather more like "the right foundations". Most interface complexity in my experience seems to be inherited from underlying interface complexity, and it takes a lot of work to fix that underlying interface complexity. This, I think is where "worse is better" shines. If you try to apply a "the right thing" approach to a system where you're dealing with shitty underlying interfaces (i.e. every popular operating system out there including every unix, and NT system) you end up with endless complexity and performance loss. So obviously nobody will want to do "the right thing" and everyone who takes the "worse is better" approach will end up way ahead of you in terms of delivering something. People will be happy (because people are almost always happy regardless of how crap your product is). On the other hand, designing something with "the right foundations" means that "the right thing" no longer needs to involve "sacrifice implementation simplicity in favour of interface simplicity" to anywhere near the same extent because your implementation can focus on implementing whatever interface you want rather than first paving over a crappy underlying interface. But the difficulty of "the right foundations" is that nobody knows what the right foundations are the first 10 times they implement them. This approach requires being able to rip the foundations up a few times. And nobody wants that, so "worse is better" wins again.

wismi 2y ago
I think there's a lot of truth to this. It reminds me of an idea in economics about the "second-best". From the wikipedia page: "In welfare economics, the theory of the second best concerns the situation when one or more optimality conditions cannot be satisfied. The economists Richard Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster showed in 1956 that if one optimality condition in an economic model cannot be satisfied, it is possible that the next-best solution involves changing other variables away from the values that would otherwise be optimal. Politically, the theory implies that if it is infeasible to remove a particular market distortion, introducing one or more additional market distortions in an interdependent market may partially counteract the first, and lead to a more efficient outcome." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_second_best https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_second_best
- germandiago 2y ago
  I hate intervention but I like analysis. Good insights there, I did not know about this theory.
jpc0 2y ago
I have a question for this premise. How would you design a network interface using your right foundations model? I'm not talking about HTML or whatnot. I have some sort of medium, copper, fiber whatever and I would like to send 10 bytes to the other side of it. What is the right foundations that would lead to an implementation which isn't overly complex.
- me_again 2y ago
  Not a direct answer, but Ethernet is sometimes brought up as a successful example of Worse is Better. At one point Token Ring was a serious competitor - it had careful designs to avoid collisions when the network was busy, prioritize traffic, etc. But it was comparatively slow and expensive. Ethernet just says "eh, retry on collision.". And that simplistic foundation has carried on to where we have a standard for 800 Gigabit Ethernet.
  - shuntress 2y ago
    Since speed and expense are relatively important and collisions are relatively rare, this sounds more like "better is better".
- Arch-TK 2y ago
  Unfortunately, I am not a network engineer. So I don't know how I would approach this problem other than to try to make sure that the resulting hardware is easy to deal with from firmware and software. I have worked with hardware directly and there is something inherently simple about some hardware APIs versus others. What's more, the complexity doesn't entirely relate to the underlying hardware or protocol complexity. The issue is, though, that reality is complicated. This is where the right foundations are important. It's not necessarily that the right foundations themselves have simple internals, but that the right foundations successfully tame the complexity of reality. The best place to work on developing the right foundations is therefore precisely at such interfaces between the real world and the software world.
- shuntress 2y ago
  > I have some sort of medium, copper, fiber whatever and I would like to send 10 bytes to the other side of it. What is the right foundations that would lead to an implementation which isn't overly complex. The bane of every project is understanding what you actually need to do For example, it is entirely possible that the "right foundation" for your proposed scenario is: Hook one end up to a lightswitch, the other to a light bulb, hire two operators trained in morse code. Then once the 10 bytes are sent write them their cheques and shut it down.
tightbookkeeper 2y ago
good comment. But I question how much you can package up inherent complexity in a simple interface, due to leaky abstraction. The biggest benefit of simplicity in design is when the whole system is simple, so it’s easy to hack on and reason about.
- Arch-TK 2y ago
  Abstraction leaks are usually a result of a worse is better approach. But yes, as I think I said in my original comment, its very difficult to successfully completely pave over a poor base. And yes, I agree that simplicity needs to start quite low down the stack (ideally at the hardware, or the firmware, or the drivers, or the kernel as a last resort) for the complexity not to explode as you keep adding layers.
gpderetta 2y ago
> But the difficulty of "the right foundations" is that nobody knows what the right foundations are the first 10 times they implement them Yes and it worse than that. The right foundations might change with time and changing requirements.
kagevf 2y ago
> the worse is better approach is better. I think this ties back to the idea of "get it working, then once it's working go back and make it fast | preformant | better for whatever meaning of better". I think much of the consternation towards "worse is better" comes from re-inventing things to achieve the "make it better" improvements from scratch instead of leveraging existing knowledge. Re-inventing might be fine, but we shouldn't throw away knowledge and establshed techniques if we can avoid it.
- zombot 2y ago
  That may be one failure mode, but another one is more prominent: Half-assing the next feature is more interesting than going back and making the last feature that you half-implemented actually work. That goes for both commercial and open-source software.
pron 2y ago
That worse-is-better is self-reinforcing and that it's the only stable strategy in an environment with less-than-perfect cooperation (i.e. it's the only Nash equilibrium) may both be true at the same time. In fact, if the latter is true then the former is alsmost certainly true. The real question is, then, whether doing "the right thing" is a stable and winning strategy at all, i.e. viable and affordable. As you yourself suspect, the answer may well be no. Not only because it takes a few tries to figure out the right foundations, but also because what foundation is right is likely to change over time as conditions change (e.g. hardware architecture changes, programming practices -- such as the use of AI assistants -- change etc.).

wismi 2y ago

I think there's a lot of truth to this. It reminds me of an idea in economics about the "second-best". From the wikipedia page: "In welfare economics, the theory of the second best concerns the situation when one or more optimality conditions cannot be satisfied. The economists Richard Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster showed in 1956 that if one optimality condition in an economic model cannot be satisfied, it is possible that the next-best solution involves changing other variables away from the values that would otherwise be optimal. Politically, the theory implies that if it is infeasible to remove a particular market distortion, introducing one or more additional market distortions in an interdependent market may partially counteract the first, and lead to a more efficient outcome." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_second_best https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_second_best

germandiago 2y ago
I hate intervention but I like analysis. Good insights there, I did not know about this theory.

jpc0 2y ago

I have a question for this premise. How would you design a network interface using your right foundations model? I'm not talking about HTML or whatnot. I have some sort of medium, copper, fiber whatever and I would like to send 10 bytes to the other side of it. What is the right foundations that would lead to an implementation which isn't overly complex.

me_again 2y ago
Not a direct answer, but Ethernet is sometimes brought up as a successful example of Worse is Better. At one point Token Ring was a serious competitor - it had careful designs to avoid collisions when the network was busy, prioritize traffic, etc. But it was comparatively slow and expensive. Ethernet just says "eh, retry on collision.". And that simplistic foundation has carried on to where we have a standard for 800 Gigabit Ethernet.
- shuntress 2y ago
  Since speed and expense are relatively important and collisions are relatively rare, this sounds more like "better is better".
Arch-TK 2y ago
Unfortunately, I am not a network engineer. So I don't know how I would approach this problem other than to try to make sure that the resulting hardware is easy to deal with from firmware and software. I have worked with hardware directly and there is something inherently simple about some hardware APIs versus others. What's more, the complexity doesn't entirely relate to the underlying hardware or protocol complexity. The issue is, though, that reality is complicated. This is where the right foundations are important. It's not necessarily that the right foundations themselves have simple internals, but that the right foundations successfully tame the complexity of reality. The best place to work on developing the right foundations is therefore precisely at such interfaces between the real world and the software world.
shuntress 2y ago
> I have some sort of medium, copper, fiber whatever and I would like to send 10 bytes to the other side of it. What is the right foundations that would lead to an implementation which isn't overly complex. The bane of every project is understanding what you actually need to do For example, it is entirely possible that the "right foundation" for your proposed scenario is: Hook one end up to a lightswitch, the other to a light bulb, hire two operators trained in morse code. Then once the 10 bytes are sent write them their cheques and shut it down.

tightbookkeeper 2y ago

good comment. But I question how much you can package up inherent complexity in a simple interface, due to leaky abstraction. The biggest benefit of simplicity in design is when the whole system is simple, so it’s easy to hack on and reason about.

Arch-TK 2y ago
Abstraction leaks are usually a result of a worse is better approach. But yes, as I think I said in my original comment, its very difficult to successfully completely pave over a poor base. And yes, I agree that simplicity needs to start quite low down the stack (ideally at the hardware, or the firmware, or the drivers, or the kernel as a last resort) for the complexity not to explode as you keep adding layers.

gpderetta 2y ago

> But the difficulty of "the right foundations" is that nobody knows what the right foundations are the first 10 times they implement them Yes and it worse than that. The right foundations might change with time and changing requirements.

kagevf 2y ago

> the worse is better approach is better. I think this ties back to the idea of "get it working, then once it's working go back and make it fast | preformant | better for whatever meaning of better". I think much of the consternation towards "worse is better" comes from re-inventing things to achieve the "make it better" improvements from scratch instead of leveraging existing knowledge. Re-inventing might be fine, but we shouldn't throw away knowledge and establshed techniques if we can avoid it.

zombot 2y ago
That may be one failure mode, but another one is more prominent: Half-assing the next feature is more interesting than going back and making the last feature that you half-implemented actually work. That goes for both commercial and open-source software.

pron 2y ago

That worse-is-better is self-reinforcing and that it's the only stable strategy in an environment with less-than-perfect cooperation (i.e. it's the only Nash equilibrium) may both be true at the same time. In fact, if the latter is true then the former is alsmost certainly true. The real question is, then, whether doing "the right thing" is a stable and winning strategy at all, i.e. viable and affordable. As you yourself suspect, the answer may well be no. Not only because it takes a few tries to figure out the right foundations, but also because what foundation is right is likely to change over time as conditions change (e.g. hardware architecture changes, programming practices -- such as the use of AI assistants -- change etc.).