It's a discussion similar in some ways to Richard P. Gabriel's "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big". It's similar to Eric Ries's ideas about a minimally

It's a discussion similar in some ways to Richard P. Gabriel's "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big". It's similar to Eric Ries's ideas about a minimally viable product. Lisp Machines running Lisp programs edited in Emacs might be the theoretically superior way to do things. Microkernels which don't crash when some device code fails might be a superior way to do things. In a competitive market with things moving forward, people don't always have the time to fiddle with something until it's perfect. By the time the Lisp people get together and hash out Common Lisp (which Gabriel says was in many ways a poor compromise), or simplify everything with Scheme - the Unix/C people have already won. By the time things like Hurd finally become viable, OS's like Linux are already everywhere. People will take the poor substitute now and make it the default worldwide, and live with the backwards compatibility problems rather than wait years for people to come down from ivory towers with the perfect solution. You can go on and on with the examples - which chip had a better instruction set, MIPS or the Intel chip with all its legacy stuff? It doesn't matter, Intel already had a toehold and people would rather stick with it than switch.