Worse is better, also called the New Jersey style, was conceived by Richard P. Gabriel to describe the dynamics of software acceptance, but it has broader application. The idea is that quality does not necessarily increase with functionality. There is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability. Software that is limited, but simple to use, may be more appealing to the user and market than software that is more comprehensive, but harder to use.
As to the oxymoronic title, Gabriel calls it a caricature, declares the style "bad" in comparison with "the right thing". However he also states that "it has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing" development style and is better than the "MIT Approach" with which it is the contrasted in the original paper.[1]
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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, after Jamie Zawinski found it in Gabriel's files at Lucid Inc. and e-mailed it to friends and colleagues.[1]
In The Rise of Worse is Better, Gabriel claims that "Worse-is-Better" is a model of software design and implementation which has the following characteristics (in approximately descending order of importance):
Gabriel argues that early Unix and C, developed by Bell Labs, are examples of this design 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 in The Rise of "Worse is Better". Contrasts to "Worse is better" are in bold:
Gabriel argues that "Worse is better" produces more successful software than the MIT approach: As long as the initial program is basically good, it will take much less time and effort to implement initially and it will be easier to adapt to new situations. Porting software to new machines, for example, becomes far easier this way. 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 its functionality, but users have already been conditioned to accept "worse" rather 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."[2]
Gabriel credits Jamie Zawinski for excerpting the worse-is-better sections of "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big" and e-mailing them to his friends at Carnegie Mellon University, who sent them to their friends at Bell Labs, "who sent them to their friends everywhere." He apparently connected these ideas to those of Richard Stallman and saw related ideas that are important in the design philosophy of Unix, and more generally in the open-source movement, both of which were central to the development of Linux.
Gabriel later answered his earlier essay with one titled Worse Is Better Is Worse[3] under the pseudonym "Nickieben Bourbaki" (an allusion to Nicolas Bourbaki).