
Worse is worse - fanf2
https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807
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AnimalMuppet
The money quote for me:

> The rest of the paper is an excellent analysis for why Lisp lost out to C as
> a programming language, even though Lisp was a superior language. Or at
> least superior on the grounds that Dick found most important. But this
> doesn't necessarily show that Lisp was in fact superior to C; it can just as
> easily be taken to show that the metrics that were cited in the article were
> not the ones that were taken to be most important by those choosing a
> programming language. The fact that C produced faster code, was easier to
> master, was easier to use in groups, and ran well on less expensive hardware
> were not considerations that Gabriel found important. But others did. On
> those metrics, the dominance of C as a programming language was an example
> of better is better, not worse is better.

I think the problem is that some people thought "better" was defined as "more
elegant design". And that wasn't the metric of "better" that mattered in the
real world.

