The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

Re:The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991) by kbp on Friday March 30, 2018 @02:37PM (#16718672)

It's mentioned at the top of the linked page, but just to highlight it, this is only an excerpt from the longer piece "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big" which was written in 1991 and talks at length about the then-current state of the Lisp world and its future. The full article is well worth a read: https://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html

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Re:The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991) by zeveb on Friday March 30, 2018 @02:55PM (#16718811)

> The full article is well worth a read: https://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html

Agreed. It’s notable (among many other things) for its comment in 3.1, ‘Scheme is a smaller Lisp, but it also suffers from the MIT approach. It is too tight and not appropriate for large-scale software.’ I’m always a bit saddened when I see a production system written in Scheme instead of Lisp.

His thoughts in 3.6 are very interesting, too. From his thoughts on method definitions, it sounds like maybe he wanted a language-specified dynamic editing environment. Either way, it’s sad that the Lisp world never came out with a proper successor to Common Lisp. It’s by far the best general-purpose language out there today, but it is not the best possible.

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Re:The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991) by nabla9 on Friday March 30, 2018 @03:07PM (#16718905)

And the longer piece you mention was just the starting point of long discussion. Read the whole thing:

https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

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