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On Tuesday 22 January 2002 10:23 am, Mark Baker wrote: > "worse is better" is usually used by people who don't see the larger > context in which a system is designed, and don't understand all the > tradeoffs that were made. This is as much a wild generalization as the "worse is better statement" itself. In the case of the WWW, I *very* much doubt that it was designed with all the tradeoffs in mind.... I watched it, and participated in it's development. If there is any person that claims they knew all we know now in 1993 (after the WWW per se was designed), and made design decisions based on tradeoffs fed by that knowledge, I'd like them to stand up *now* so I can call them a liar to their face. The WWW was designed to be "good enough" to do basic things, and has evolved since. The whole bogosity in URI's and the nonsense in "URI space" in WebDAV, and REST for that matter, are shoehorning additional semantics (or denying they exist despite reality) on top of an existing system. These often work well, sometimes only so-so. The system was *not* designed with these things in mind. Part of the beauty of the WWW is that it does remain "good enough". This style of development (rapid evolutionary design I used to call it), is one methodology, and often beats "better is better" because it leverages short-term success to build momentum. It also generally requires prototypes to be thrown away (you have to know when to stop teaching the old dog new tricks). Another kind of design is used when "good enough" doesn't cut it, and is only applicable if the problem domain is very well understood. In that case, you *can* design systems that work exactly as specified. That is "software engineering" as a science vs. "software engineering" as an art. I'd be *really* upset if someone designed the flight control system of commerical airliners like we did the WWW. Jesus Monroy exemplifies the "better is better school" http://www.kclug.org/old_archives/linux-activists/1993/apr/3/0032.shtml and sometimes I agree with him, that we should "Hang The Engineer". I'm not sure his FDC code ever did ship though ;-)
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