1 week ago - "Worse is better" or the "New Jersey style" is a term coined by Richard P. Gabriel in a 1989 essay to describe the dynamics of software acceptance and the frequency with which "worse" designs seem to outcompete better ones. The essay argues simple, hacked-together software that makes it to ...

One day in Spring 1989, I was sitting out on the Lucid porch with some of the hackers, and someone asked me why I thought people believed C and Unix were better than Lisp. I jokingly answered, "because, well, worse is better." We laughed over it for a while as I tried to make up an argument for why something clearly lousy could be good.

Half the computers that exist at any point are worse than median (smaller or slower). Unix and C work fine on them. The worse-is-better philosophy means that implementation simplicity has highest priority, which means Unix and C are easy to port on such machines.

The worse-is-better philosophy means that implementation simplicity has highest priority, which means Unix and C are easy to port on such machines. Therefore, one expects that if the 50% functionality Unix and C support is satisfactory, they will start to appear everywhere.

27 March 2025 - However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.

9 November 2022 - Hmm depends.. worse is better really is about "if you haven't got a good solution, don't solve it, and leave a way for people to handle it themselves". I'm certain spaces this is the right attitude for features.

28 February 2014 - The moral of "worse is better" is that evolutionary superiority (cheaper, faster, 80% of the solution at half the cost, etc.) trumps technical superiority (correctness, completeness, usability, security, simplicity of interface and so on) in the marketplace.

2 June 2011 - The worse-is-better design philosophy, originally described in Richard Gabriel's article The Rise of Worse is Better, argues that for a particular technology to be successful, it is acceptable for that technology to trade interface simplicity (that is, ease of use) for implementation simplicity (that is, ease of implementation).

17 January 2018 - In 1991 Richard Gabriel wrote a insightful and influential article about the difference in designing software systems in the “MIT Style” and “New Jersey Style” (AT&T), where he termed the latter “worse is better”. He argued that when building software, the “MIT style” of getting the design “right” (at the cost of complexity in implementation) loses out to the “New Jersey” style of keeping the design easy to implement (at the cost of giving users weaker guarantees and a more complex interface).

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Half the computers that exist at any point are worse than median (smaller or slower). Unix and C work fine on them. The worse-is-better philosophy means that implementation simplicity has highest priority, which means Unix and C are easy to port on such machines.

13 October 2014 - Thus when Richard P. Gabriel published his original essay in 1989 from which “The Rise of Worse is Better” was later extracted and circulated, he was merely giving a name and a slogan to a fragment of culture that was already well on its way to taking over the industry.

work fine on them. The worse-is-better philosophy means that implementation simplicity has

“The Rise of Worse is Better” is a famous essay in the software industry. It says that lazily-looking code that does not provide a consistent interface is sometimes actually better than neatly layered, consistent one.

4 January 2016 - “Worse is Better” by Richard P. Gabriel Simplicity The design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface …

17 October 2014 - I think this criticism is slightly misattributed. Ideologues ask us to accept a false dichotomy. Ideologues exist on both sides of an issue usually. For example, there are most definitely ideologues who believe this same dichotomy exists, but believe that the only option is to choose beauty ...

19 March 2024 - JavaScript wasn't designed by computer science experts in ivory towers writing out the best formalisms of its day, it was designed by whatever engineers at Netscape could get something working out the door the fastest. It's the quintessential Worse is Better story where the thing that is just good enough to proliferate quickly is the thing that wins.