Worse is Better
I saw that Jim Waldo critiqued "Worse is Better", mostly negatively. While I agree with Jim's assertion that "better" is subjective and with his conclusion that the "Worse is Better" ethic can be an excuse for sloppy work, I think that he also ignores part of the Lisp vs. C comparison, in that at the time of the original essay, COBOL and probably FORTRAN were more widely used than C. Was that because worse is better? In the '90s C is became more of a specialty language in favor of C++, which is itself becoming a specialty language in the face of Java and .Net. By the 1994 definition of "better" (performance) Java is worse than C. Worse is better. By the same definition, Python is worse than Java, but last time I was at the bookstore, the clerk told me that Python books have been flying off the shelves. Worse is better.
What bothers me most about people bringing up this essay is that Dick Gabriel didn't even stand by his original conclusions
However, despite the apparent enthusiasm by the rest of the world, I was uneasy about the concept of worse is better, and especially with my association with it.
I'm a little tired of Worse is Better being used as a straw man. I've never seen anyone bring up Dick's page dedicated to the Worse is Better essay, but there's a goldmine of info there, including Gabriel questioning his own conclusion. Jim's got excellent points. I think that we should design software as well as we know how, but there's no money in selling designs and investors don't invest in philosophy. At the end of the day, there has to be a usable implementation. And, like "better", the trick is defining "usable".