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Comment by jonathanrmumm | Hacker News Reader

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jonathanrmumm

why not just say "less is better?"

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Because that's not the common, generally accepted term.

Because "Worse is Better" entered the lexicon circa 1991.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

yes, why? seems like not that useful of a phrase if it needs an explanation with parenthesis in a wikipedia

The phrase was made famous in an influential essay[0] by Richard P. Gabriel, where he laments Lisp's relative failure to compete with Unix.

In Gabriel's opinion, Unix proved to follow the more adaptive design strategy in certain ways (in spite of his involvement with and admiration for Lisp), and the phrase "Worse is better" is meant to capture the essence of that advantageous strategy (as outlined in the essay).

The essay is worth reading and is a bit more elaborate than just saying "less is more", or "keep it simple, stupid".

[0] https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

Ah so it’s more “if it’s not broken enough, don’t fix it”

Read the essays, they're excellent.

> it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed

yes, this is a much better explanation than the wikipedia

"Worse is better" comes from an ancient story where the Lisp folks were trying to design an elaborate system for resuming interrupted syscalls, and the UNIX folks just returned a "we fucked up" error to the caller instead. People take different lessons from this. Personally I feel like this is one of the earliest software forms of YAGNI: the (lack of) severity didn't merit the engineering effort to "fix" it. But, OP's interpretation is also valid.

It doesn't convey the same idea

What idea does "worse is better" convey to someone who hasn't heard of the phrase before?

then someone needs to update the wikipedia

> It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.

"Worse" is not "less". It's about things like non-complete features, non-scalable architecture, and non-fully solved problems.

Besides, "less is better" is not a paradox.

There is another famous phrase that is "less is more". But it's a very different one (And "less" would clearly map into "not worse".)

Exactly. "Worse is better" makes zero sense.

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