3 ms·

My take on "worse is better" is that "worse is cheap / free / low friction." Better -- meaning polished, thoroughly engineered, correct, etc. -- is often heavi

by api 1y ago

My take on "worse is better" is that "worse is cheap / free / low friction." Better -- meaning polished, thoroughly engineered, correct, etc. -- is often heavier in terms of hardware requirements. It's also often a lot of work by serious career devs or big companies and costs money and has a non-OSS license. All that increases not only cost but more importantly friction. So the "worse" cheap/free unencumbered thing goes viral and takes over instead. I should add the caveat though -- it's cheap/free up front but you pay later in bugs and ugly hacks to make it work at larger scale. But up front friction matters more than friction later. If it's cheap/free in terms of cost or friction now, you'll already have sunk cost by the time the real cost becomes apparent.

linguae 1y ago
I 100% agree. In fact, even in the original C/Unix versus Lisp/Lisp machines that were mentioned in Richard's Gabriel "The Rise of Worse is Better" article, C and Unix were inexpensive compared to Lisp implementations and Lisp machines. Unix's relatively liberal licensing rules in the 1970s and early 1980s helped lead to its embrace in academia, and it also gained a footing in industry, especially with the rise of Unix workstations from companies such as Sun. Another example is how C++ and Java, but not Smalltalk, became the dominant object-oriented programming languages in the 1990s, despite Smalltalk being older and (debatably) being closer to Richard Gabriel's "right thing". There were affordable C++ implementations from Borland and Microsoft, and Sun released the Java Development Kit for free. However, the leading Smalltalk implementations of the 1990s were much more expensive. Perhaps had there been a Borland Turbo Smalltalk or a Microsoft Visual Smalltalk in the 1990s, maybe things would have turned out differently.
- igouy 1y ago
  March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1." https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=digitalk%20v%2F286&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q=digitalk%20v/286&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=d... September 1991 — "Smalltalk/V code is portable between the Windows and the OS/2 versions. And the resulting application carries no runtime charges. All for just $499.95." (Advert on the last page of "The Smalltalk Report") https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkReport/PDFS/ST/91_95/SMAL0101.PDF https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkRepor... September 1991 — "Digitalk, Inc. announced new versions of Smalltalk/V DOS and Smalltalk/V Mac that include royalty-free runtime. Smalltalk/V Windows and Smalltalk/V PM are already royalty free. … Prior to this new policy, there was a per-copy charge for runtime applications." "The Smalltalk Report" p25 https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkReport/PDFS/ST/91_95/SMAL0101.PDF https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkRepor... ~ https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914 https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914 Lest we forget applets https://dev.java/duke/ https://dev.java/duke/
johnnyjeans 1y ago
Engineers like to work from the bottom up because nature isn't made out of straight lines and regularity. Breaking things apart into abstractions works to a certain point, then the natural irregularity of reality steps in and you need to be able to react to that and adjust your foundation. So yes, fundamentally it is about thermodynamic knock-on-effects of handling things from the top-down. Messing around with lisp and smalltalk environments is fun. But the moment you have to stick your hand beneath the surface, you can very quickly end up in someone else's overengineering hell. Most serious GNU Emacs users shudder at the thought of hitting Doom Emacs with a wrench until it suits their tastes. It's universally agreed that building your Emacs environment up from the defaults is fundamentally a wiser choice. Now realize that a full Lisp operating system is several orders of magnitude more complex than Doom Emacs, and most things you're going to program emacs to do are absolutely trivial in comparison to most industrial-grade application logic.

by api 1y ago

linguae 1y ago

I 100% agree. In fact, even in the original C/Unix versus Lisp/Lisp machines that were mentioned in Richard's Gabriel "The Rise of Worse is Better" article, C and Unix were inexpensive compared to Lisp implementations and Lisp machines. Unix's relatively liberal licensing rules in the 1970s and early 1980s helped lead to its embrace in academia, and it also gained a footing in industry, especially with the rise of Unix workstations from companies such as Sun. Another example is how C++ and Java, but not Smalltalk, became the dominant object-oriented programming languages in the 1990s, despite Smalltalk being older and (debatably) being closer to Richard Gabriel's "right thing". There were affordable C++ implementations from Borland and Microsoft, and Sun released the Java Development Kit for free. However, the leading Smalltalk implementations of the 1990s were much more expensive. Perhaps had there been a Borland Turbo Smalltalk or a Microsoft Visual Smalltalk in the 1990s, maybe things would have turned out differently.

igouy 1y ago
March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1." https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=digitalk%20v%2F286&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q=digitalk%20v/286&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=d... September 1991 — "Smalltalk/V code is portable between the Windows and the OS/2 versions. And the resulting application carries no runtime charges. All for just $499.95." (Advert on the last page of "The Smalltalk Report") https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkReport/PDFS/ST/91_95/SMAL0101.PDF https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkRepor... September 1991 — "Digitalk, Inc. announced new versions of Smalltalk/V DOS and Smalltalk/V Mac that include royalty-free runtime. Smalltalk/V Windows and Smalltalk/V PM are already royalty free. … Prior to this new policy, there was a per-copy charge for runtime applications." "The Smalltalk Report" p25 https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkReport/PDFS/ST/91_95/SMAL0101.PDF https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkRepor... ~ https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914 https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914 Lest we forget applets https://dev.java/duke/ https://dev.java/duke/

johnnyjeans 1y ago

Engineers like to work from the bottom up because nature isn't made out of straight lines and regularity. Breaking things apart into abstractions works to a certain point, then the natural irregularity of reality steps in and you need to be able to react to that and adjust your foundation. So yes, fundamentally it is about thermodynamic knock-on-effects of handling things from the top-down. Messing around with lisp and smalltalk environments is fun. But the moment you have to stick your hand beneath the surface, you can very quickly end up in someone else's overengineering hell. Most serious GNU Emacs users shudder at the thought of hitting Doom Emacs with a wrench until it suits their tastes. It's universally agreed that building your Emacs environment up from the defaults is fundamentally a wiser choice. Now realize that a full Lisp operating system is several orders of magnitude more complex than Doom Emacs, and most things you're going to program emacs to do are absolutely trivial in comparison to most industrial-grade application logic.