
Worse is worse - soundsop
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807
======
ced
_The fact that C produced faster code, was easier to master, was easier to use
in groups, and ran well on less expensive hardware_

He missed the point of _Worse is Better_. Given sufficient time and effort,
Lisp will eventually be _just as fast_ as C, and will run on the exact same
hardware. Heck, we're already pretty damn close to that, but it took us _50
years_. C/Unix won because it got there much earlier, and it did so by
compromising the design in order to get a clean/easy implementation.

As for C being easier to master, that's a highly dubious claim, and it's not
even relevant. The crux of Worse is Better is that if you can't do the right
thing, you simply shift the burden to the user. Bignums are hard to get right?
No sweat: programmers will just have to learn to live with integers that
magically wrap around when they reach 32768.

Making a language that's easy to learn _is_ the Right Thing. Maybe Lisp failed
in that regard, but that's hardly a point against the essay's thesis.

------
russell
The article corrects some of the myths about how the inferior product beat out
the better one, betamax vs vhs, for instance. People tend to forget the
contexts in which some of these decisions were made. After using languages
like Pascal, the switch to C was truly liberating. Sure you could do dangerous
things, but you could also write good code without fighting the language. Or
take Windows vs Unix. I installed Unix on my first PC. I had to pay $500 more
for Unix (on 10 floppies) and another $500 for the extra memory and disk space
to run it. Most people in the world made the opposite choice.

------
11ren
> The end result of this thinking is sloppy products that don't work, are hard
> to use, or are unreliable

But won't competition take care of that... if the market really does care
about those metrics?

