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1/23/02 9:37:13 AM, Mark Baker <distobj@a...> wrote: >My objection is simply the name and the meaning that the name invokes, >that it's somehow a good idea to be "worse", because sometimes "worse >is better". Considering the whole system when designing, rather than >just part of it, can in no way be considered "worse". I don't >disagree with the conclusion of "worse is better", but I disagree with >the unfortunate choice of wording. I much prefer the way Kernighan and Plauger phrased the concept back in 1976 in _Software Tools_: something like (I don't have a copy handy) "something that does 90% of the job today is often better than something that promises to do 100% of the job sometime in the next 6 months." IMHO, if you come (as I do) from a math background, it's easy to overemphasize completeness and internal elegance. Both of them are highly desirable properties for certain classes of abstract concepts, but I'm a realist in the philosophical sense, and therefore view abstractions as (necessarily imperfect) models of reality, rather than reality as imperfect realizations of abstractions. It's certainly a Good Thing that Turing came up with an elegant and complete formal model of computation, but that doesn't imply that his formalisms are the Best Way to implement real- world systems.
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