Top all-time · #100
Richard P. Gabriel
Personal blog · dreamsongs.comprogrammingwriting
Richard P. Gabriel writes Dreamsongs, a personal blog at dreamsongs.com about programming and writing. Since 2007, 357 different Hacker News readers have linked it 594 times, most often “The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Richard P. Gabriel's dreamsongs.com for the 'Worse Is Better' essay and his software-pattern writing, most often in arguments about MIT versus New Jersey design.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- commenters call Gabriel's writing insightful, beautifully written, a great read, very accessible, thought-provoking
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)50 people · 57 mentions · first linked 2015-01-16
- Worse Is Better (2001)41 people · 49 mentions · first linked 2014-10-14
- The Rise of Worse Is Better26 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2017-04-06
- Patterns of Software (1996) [pdf]22 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2015-04-03
- Worse is Better20 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2007-10-24
- The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)20 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2013-01-01
- Worse Is Better (2001)18 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2018-03-30
- Worse Is Better17 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2010-02-09
- Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-10-16
- The Evolution of Lisp (1993) [pdf]9 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2016-12-31
What Hacker News says?
Can you point to an airtight law regarding speech that exists today - both as written and enforced? I can't. This is a worse is better[1] situation. Specifically, I'm arguing against the MIT approach to lawmaking. The MIT approach: > The design must be consistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness. Thinking about laws l…
Comment linking /WIB.html
on “What if we made advertising illegal?”Submitted The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991) as a story · 265 points
HN discussion> Smalltalk and lisp does this very well - you can't AFAIK quite go that far with c++, but it's what all systems should aspire to, as a baseline (70s debug experience) Actually that was were we were going to before Java took over the stage. "Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk https://dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html IBM also built on those ideas for the 4th release of Visual Age f…
Comment linking /Cadillac.html
on “I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time”Submitted The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003) as a story · 205 points
HN discussion1. After Engelbart's group disbanded it seemed like he ended up in the wilderness for a long time, and focused his attention on management. I'll project onto him and would guess that he felt more constrained by his social or economic context than he was by technology, that he envisioned possibilities that were unattainable for reasons that weren't technical. I'm curious if you do or have felt the same way, and if ha…
Comment linking /RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
on “Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today”Submitted Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991) as a story · 120 points
HN discussionYes, worse is better. https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
Comment linking /RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
on “RethinkDB Postmortem”Submitted The Evolution of Lisp (1993) [pdf] as a story · 103 points
HN discussionPizza has weak network effects. The capitalization, brand recognition, and streamlined corporate franchise structure, cooperate to make it easier to launch and run a Domino's franchise, than to start a pizza joint from scratch. But not that much easier. There is plenty of room to market better pizza for more money. Computer systems tend to have strong network effects, there's a lot to learn and a skilled developer i…
Comment linking /Files/LispGoodNewsBadNews.pdf
on “Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace”Submitted A Review of the Art of the Metaobject Protocol (2010) [pdf] as a story · 95 points
HN discussion"A flurry of hacks" indicates you did not understand worse-is-better: http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf "This advice is corrosive. It warps the minds of youth. It is never a good idea to intentionally aim for anything less than the best, though one might have to compromise in order to succeed"
Comment linking /Files/worse-is-worse.pdf
on “The Case for Slow Programming”Submitted The Art of Lisp and Writing as a story · 91 points
HN discussionhttps://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
Comment linking /RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
on “MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System”Submitted The Evolution of Lisp (1993) [pdf] as a story · 91 points
HN discussionIt's the classis "Worse is Better" debate, lived out via consumer objects instead of lisp and c. Paging Richard Garbriel to Hacker News... http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
Comment linking /WorseIsBetter.html
on “The Worst”Submitted Worse Is Better (2001) as a story · 88 points
HN discussionSounds like it might be straight from the original "worse is better" essay: http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html > The MIT guy did not see any code that handled this case and asked the New Jersey guy how the problem was handled. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix folks were aware of the problem, but the solution was for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned t…
Comment linking /RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
on “I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride”Submitted The Art of Lisp & Writing as a story · 80 points
HN discussionhttps://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html tl;dr: Ubiquity is a feature. Implementation simplicity enables ubiquity by making it easy to port and easy to bring new people on board. Implementation simplicity also frequently results in technical inferiority, but it doesn't matter, because users would rather have substandard software that runs quickly on all devices they target than excellent software that is…
Comment linking /RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
on “Electron 1.0 is here”Submitted The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991) as a story · 77 points
HN discussionI think of it as a matter of scale. - At the scale of 1,000 to 1M lines of code, authors/programmers have some control, and you're dealing with a time scale of months or years. - At the scale of 10M to 100M lines of code, no organization is an author with complete control, and you're dealing with a time scale of decades. In the latter case, you can't make global changes to the system, so you end up with glue in the…
Comment linking /Files/DesignBeyondHumanAbilitiesSimp.pdf
on “Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping Lego blocks (2011)”Submitted The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution (2012) [pdf] as a story · 77 points
HN discussionMaybe this was tongue-in-cheek in a way that eludes me, but in case any innocent and curious bystanders are as confused as me by your comment, I'm not sure "Worse Is Better" refers to what you think it does. It isn't about "features and functionality", it's about how ease of implementation beats everything else. I can't see how that applies here, or what your comment means in that light. Here's the original essay --…
Comment linking /RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
on “Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp”Submitted The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003) as a story · 76 points
HN discussionHe does not. https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html > One day in Spring 1989, I was sitting out on the Lucid porch with some of the hackers, and someone asked me why I thought people believed C and Unix were better than Lisp. I jokingly answered, "because, well, worse is better." We laughed over it for a while as I tried to make up an argument for why something clearly lousy could be good. He then wrote Lisp: Goo…
Comment linking /RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
on “Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp”Submitted Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1990) [pdf] as a story · 72 points
HN discussionIn The Mythical Man Month Fred Brooks said "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." I first read that on Guy Steele's site: http://www.dreamsongs.com/ObjectsHaveNotFailedNarr.html
Comment linking /ObjectsHaveNotFailedNarr.html
on “Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989)”Submitted Patterns of Software (1996) [pdf] as a story · 67 points
HN discussionIf you're trying to connect Alexander to software patterns like GOF, it's important to include Gabriel's "Patterns of Software" [1] as the first genuine attempt to apply Alexandrian patterns to software. It also introduces the first and probably the best takedown of OO inheritance as not reuse but instead a form of _compression_ that is in many ways worse than just copy-and-paste. 1 - https://www.dreamsongs.com/File…
Comment linking /Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
on “Patterns.dev”Submitted InkWell: A Creative Writer’s Creative Assistant [pdf] as a story · 59 points
HN discussion
