Worse is worse

artima.com

29 points·soundsop··3 comments

The fact that C produced faster code, was easier to master, was easier to use in groups, and ran well on less expensive hardware

He missed the point of Worse is Better. Given sufficient time and effort, Lisp will eventually be just as fast as C, and will run on the exact same hardware. Heck, we're already pretty damn close to that, but it took us 50 years. C/Unix won because it got there much earlier, and it did so by compromising the design in order to get a clean/easy implementation.

As for C being easier to master, that's a highly dubious claim, and it's not even relevant. The crux of Worse is Better is that if you can't do the right thing, you simply shift the burden to the user. Bignums are hard to get right? No sweat: programmers will just have to learn to live with integers that magically wrap around when they reach 32768.

Making a language that's easy to learn is the Right Thing. Maybe Lisp failed in that regard, but that's hardly a point against the essay's thesis.

The article corrects some of the myths about how the inferior product beat out the better one, betamax vs vhs, for instance. People tend to forget the contexts in which some of these decisions were made. After using languages like Pascal, the switch to C was truly liberating. Sure you could do dangerous things, but you could also write good code without fighting the language. Or take Windows vs Unix. I installed Unix on my first PC. I had to pay $500 more for Unix (on 10 floppies) and another $500 for the extra memory and disk space to run it. Most people in the world made the opposite choice.

> The end result of this thinking is sloppy products that don't work, are hard to use, or are unreliable

But won't competition take care of that... if the market really does care about those metrics?

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