> Gabriel offers the examples of the adoption of C over Lisp, Unix over Lisp machines and VMS, and x86 over reduced instruction set computers as examples of technically worse solutions defeating more elegant ones by arriving to market first.

Even (especially?) as a person that appreciates Lisp, Lisp losing this fight twice is kind of funny.

Wonder if it’s going to happen an nth time with Guix vs Nix

No thanks. We've spent enough decades living in squatter camps built on the ruins of other people's lazy decisions. It's past time to move out now. Worse is worse; worse is shit. And there's nothing endearing or funny about Winer's bad behaviour.

I used to be on Dave Winer's scripting-news mailing list, and then somebody posted a request to be removed, so he removed them in a huff and then complained about how they hurt his feelings to the rest of the mailing list (not that they spammed the list, but that he was insulted they wanted off).

After that, I was afraid to ask him to remove me too! I think I finally just moved on to another email address.

There's supposed to be a mailing-list-name-REQUEST email address just for administrative questions like that, but so many people now don't even know or support that, and just send removal requests to the whole list. Instead of complaining about people asking the whole mailing list to be removed, there's a much better passive aggressive strategy:

My favorite instance of emergent mailing list behavior was when a trouble maker named GUMBY created a "PLEASE-REMOVE-ME" mailing list, just for people who sent email to another entire mailing list asking to be removed from it, instead of sending their request to the administrator at mailing-list-name-REQUEST.

Whenever somebody would make that faux-pas, he'd add them to the PLEASE-REMOVE-ME mailing list, and the emergent behavior was that those people would discuss amongst themselves the fact that they really wanted to be removed from the PLEASE-REMOVE-ME mailing list, until they eventually learned that the way to get removed from a mailing list was to simply send email to PLEASE-REMOVE-ME-REQUEST, instead of the entire mailing list.

Worked like a charm!

Isn't this just VHS v Betamax again?