The Rise of ""Worse Is Better""

Richard Gabriel's 1989 essay (excerpted by Jamie Zawinski at Lucid in 1991 and emailed across CMU and Bell Labs, becoming canonical thereafter) on why C and Unix beat Lisp and the MIT/Stanford "Right Thing" school of design. The MIT philosophy prioritized correctness, consistency, completeness, then simplicity. The New Jersey "Worse Is Better" philosophy inverted that: simplicity of implementation above all, then a 50–80% product that runs on the below-average hardware most people actually have, gets adopted, and grows extensions until it crosses 90%. Gabriel later half-disavowed his own argument under the pseudonym Nickieben Bourbaki — and still hasn't fully decided whether worse really is better. Note: the canonical file is hosted at jwz.org because Zawinski extracted and circulated it; site disallows automated fetching, so this summary is built from extensive secondary sources.