Worse is better

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Worse is better, also called the New Jersey style, is the name of a computer software design approach (or design philosophy) in which simplicity of both interface and implementation is more important than any other system attribute (including correctness, consistency, and completeness). The term alludes to newspeak slogans from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four.

1 Origin
2 Description
3 The MIT approach
4 Effects
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Origin

Lisp expert Richard P. Gabriel came up with the concept in 1989 and presented it in his essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big". A section of the article, entitled "The Rise of 'Worse is Better'", was widely disseminated beginning in 1991.

[edit] Description

Gabriel characterizes "Worse is better" as emphasizing the following attributes:

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.
Correctness: The design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.
Consistency: The design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency.
Completeness: The design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must be sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface.

Gabriel argues that early Unix and C, developed by Bell Labs, are examples of this design approach.

[edit] The MIT approach

Gabriel contrasts the philosophy of "Worse is better" 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.
Correctness: The design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is unacceptable.
Consistency: The design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
Completeness: As with the philosophy of "Worse is better", the design must cover as many important situations as is practical, and all reasonably expected cases must be covered. However, simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.

[edit] Effects

Gabriel argues that "Worse is better" produces more successful software than the MIT approach: As long as the initial program is basically good, it is easier to port to new machines and situations, and will take much less time and effort to implement initially. Thus its use will spread rapidly, long before a program developed using the MIT approach has a chance to be developed and deployed. Once it has spread, there will be pressure to improve it by improving its functionality, but users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the "right thing". "Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing. In concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better."

Closely related ideas are important in the design philosophy of Unix and in the open-source movement.

Gabriel's essay was a response to talk of "More is Less", an attack on bloated software design. At this time, UNIX and the C programming language had rapidly overtaken LISP as the dominant development environment in the computer science research community, and relations between Bell Labs and the Artificial Intelligence communities at MIT and Stanford were highly contentious.