Busy week coding -- but there was one delightful article that led me down a small rabbit hole of Richard P Gabriel's writing about "worse is better" from 1989/90. The hub for this idea is here: Richard P. Gabriel: "Worse Is Better", https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html And I found it via: Christine Lemmer-Webber: "How decentralized is Bluesky really?", 2024-11-22, https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ The idea of "worse is better" got connected to Gall's Law, and loosely relates to why idealistic, big software rewrites fail so often. And why things that are imperfect but provide value proliferate.

There is nothing at all absurd in theconclusion. It seems to me quite possible that at that particular moment in thedevelopment of Western thought there was the possibility for the birth of a sci-ence of psychology of a sort that still does not exist, a psychology that beginswith the problem of characterizing various systems of human knowledge andbelief, the concepts in terms of which they are organized and the principles thatunderlie them, and that only then turns to the study of how these systems mighthave developed through some combination of innate structure and organism –environment interaction. Such a psychology would contrast rather sharply withthe approach to human intelligence that begins by postulating, on a priorigrounds, certain specific mechanisms that, it is claimed, must be those underly-ing the acquisition of all knowledge and belief. The distinction is one to whichI will return in a subsequent lecture.

Gall's Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from Gall's book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. It states: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Gall’s Law, which states that a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. Contrast this with a complex system designed from scratch, which never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.