Talk:Worse is better

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There is a discrepancy between simplicity rules?? Which one is right?

*"Simplicity: the design must be simple in implementation and interface. However, it is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design."

He argues that early Unix and C are examples of this design approach.

Gabriel contrasts this philosophy to the so-called "MIT approach" (also known as "the Right Thing"), which he describes as follows:

• "Simplicity: the design must be simple in implementation and interface. However, it is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation."

I see no descrepancy here- but say simplicity is good, but disagree with whether, when you make the tradeoffs, you should simplify the interface or the implementation. --Maru (talk) Contribs 17:37, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "More is Less"

I can't find any reference to any paper by rob pike by the title of "More is Less", any references? Maybe you meant "Program Design in the UNIX Environment" AKA "cat -v considered harmful". Lost Goblin 14:17, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

I'll ask Rob about this, but I recall seeing the paper years ago. It was using the program "more" as a specific example of feature bloat. I'll double check this. DonPMitchell 19:49, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to remove the quote, because Rob and I cannot recall who wrote "More is Less". The WIB article was written during the period of back and forth sniping between Bell Labs and the MIT/Stanford AI communities. It makes more sense to people if they realize its historical context.

I would still love to get a copy of that paper, I'm a big fan of "cat -v considered harmful" :) Lost Goblin 10:31, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Historical context

There's a lot going on here historically (I was at Bell Labs while these flame wars were going on, mostly over "netnews" groups). This is just one of many flames that somehow became famous.

At MIT and Stanford AI labs, there was frustration about the popularity of C and UNIX, and the decline of interest in LISP. At Bell Labs, there was a strong distrust of AI, which they considered a source of fraud in the computer-science community. Also a distrust of "hacker" programming, which the Bell Labs UNIX authors thought was sloppy and verbose.

It's an important period because this contention is also part of the context for the creation of the GNU project, which originally had a strong anti-UNIX motivation (even though for a long time, it was largely a rewrite of /usr/bin commands from UNIX). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by DonPMitchell (talk • contribs).

I remember that bit of GNU- RMS' original manifesto said the second most important (and eventually most important, I hear the plan was) language was going to be a Lisp. We all know how well that turned out; aside from Emacs, the only real Lisp stuff for GNU are the Guile extensions, which AFAIK are none too popular. --maru (talk) contribs 05:32, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

A big turning point for LISP was the failure of the VLSI design project at MCC. The managers basically said that the software-engineering characteristics of LISP were a big reason that the huge project ended up in a train wreck. We heard about this at Bell Labs because some of folks had left to join MCC a few years before. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by DonPMitchell (talk • contribs).

Really? In all my reading, I've never heard of this project. Did they publish any papers or books I could get a hold of? --maru (talk) contribs 18:25, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Only SCCC

Only simplicity, correctness, consistency, completeness matters finally, the rest is wordplay. V4vijayakumar 05:32, 16 November 2006 (UTC)