Worse is better

The most popular technology may not be the best. In 1989 Richard P. Gabriel coined the term Worse is Better, a clearly humorous take on certain tendencies in software development and design as he saw them. I first encountered the term in his book Patterns of Software, and I'm basing the following on that. In essence, another way to state the epigram is that perfection is the enemy of the good. Gabriel's context was the juxtaposition of Lisp versus C++. Gabriel had founded Lucid, a company that offered a general-purpose, cross-platform Lisp compiler, only to see C++ becoming the de-facto cross-platform programming language. The Lucid people considered Lisp superior, and were casting for an explanation why the inferior product was winning. It's not my agenda to repeat Gabriel's entire line of reasoning. Rather, I want to highlight other areas of software-development technology where a similar relationship exists: A superior technology or process has lost to a more popular alternative.…