Worse is better

Gabriel was a Lisp programmer when he formulated the concept in 1989, presenting it in his essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big". A section of the article, titled "The Rise of 'Worse is Better, was widely disseminated beginning in 1991, after Jamie Zawinski found it in Gabriel's files at Lucid Inc. and emailed it to friends and colleagues. == Characteristics ==

In The Rise of Worse is Better, Gabriel identified a "Worse is Better" model of software design and implementation which has the characteristics of simplicity, correctness, consistency, and completeness (in approximately descending order of importance). Gabriel contrasted his philosophy, also called the "New Jersey style", "Berkeley", or "West coast" model, with what he called the "MIT/Stanford style of design" or "MIT approach", also known as the "east coast" approach or "the Right Thing". Gabriel argued that early Unix and C, developed by Bell Labs, are examples of the worse-is-better design approach. He also calls them "the ultimate computer viruses", due to their rapid spread. == Effects ==

Gabriel argued that "Worse is better" produced more successful software than the MIT approach: As long as the initial program is basically good, it will take much less time and effort to implement initially and it will be easier to adapt to new situations. Porting software to new machines, for example, becomes far easier this way. Thus its use will spread rapidly, long before a program developed using the MIT approach has a chance to be developed and deployed (first-mover advantage). Once it has spread, there will be pressure to improve its functionality, but users have already been conditioned to accept "worse" rather than the "right thing": Gabriel credits Jamie Zawinski for excerpting the worse-is-better sections of "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big" and e-mailing them to his friends at Carnegie Mellon University, who sent them to their friends at Bell Labs, "who sent them to their friends everywhere". He apparently connected these ideas to those of Richard Stallman and saw related ideas that are important in the design philosophy of Unix, and more generally in the open-source movement, both of which were central to the development of Linux. In December 2000 Gabriel answered his earlier essay with one titled Worse Is Better Is Worse under the pseudonym Nickieben Bourbaki (an allusion to Nicolas Bourbaki), while also writing Is Worse Really Better?, applying the concept to C++'s success in the field of object-oriented programming despite the existence of more elegant languages designed around the concept. The UNIX-HATERS Handbook includes Worse is Better as an appendix, and frames the concept in terms of worse-is-better in the form of Unix being "evolutionarily superior" to its competition. == See also ==