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by qwertyboy 3782 days ago
"Worse is better" is an incomplete sentence.

Different folks complete it in different ways. Some say that worse is better than complex. Others claim it's better than slow. Others still that it's better than incompatible. The point of the posted link is that worse is better than nothing. One can hardly argue with that.

1 comments

> The point of the posted link is that worse is better than nothing.

No, that's inaccurate.

For instance, one example the article used to support WiB was that x86 (a CISC architecture) beat out RISC architectures. There were many RISC architectures: MIPS, SPARC, DEC Alpha, PA-RISC. So it's not a case of worse is better than nothing. x86 won against real competition, because it took advantage of evolutionary pressures.

The article contains several examples for the different interpretations. CISC vs. RISC is an example of "worse is better than incompatible". Unix vs. lisp-machine is an example of "worse is better than complex". But the bottom line, for this specific author, is that worse is better than nothing.