[jbooth]

So he invested time in building up his straw-man before tearing it down?

The problem with being in such a rush to confirm your own worldview is that you don't learn anything from anyone else's. The 'worse is better' philosophy is about valuing simplicity over completeness, specifically in the context of UNIX/C vs Lisp machines back in the 80s. How do you think most of those people feel about, say, the STL?

[rjberry]

Not that it particularly matters whether we're talking about C++, as it's rather tangential, the original essay by Richard P. Gabriel that coined the term "Worse is Better" talks about C++ (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html):

  The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

In his later essay on the same topic (http://dreamsongs.com/Files/IsWorseReallyBetter.pdf) he again talks about C++:

   In the computer world, the example of interest to JOOP readers is C++. Many would concede that languages like Smalltalk, Eiffel, and CLOS are vastly “better" in some sense than C++, but, because of its worse-is-better characteristics, the fortunes of object-oriented programming probably lie with C++.

Simplicity is more often simplicity of implementation than interface. Anyone who's worked with the C standard library knows that it's anything but simple. There's a lot of incidental complexity that is due to design inconsistencies. The complex parts of a language like Haskell are the bits where the ideas themselves are complicated, but the power you get for overcoming that initial learning curve is very great.

[Retra]

"Worse is better" doesn't preclude good design. Something like STL is fairly straightforward to implement, so it is not too hard to get it right.

C++ has a problem with bloat and 'tacked on' features, and that is clearly 'worse is better' design. Backwards compatibility is a huge indicator of this kind of thinking. Partial backwards compatibility is an even more egregious example.