What “Worse is Better vs. The Right Thing” is really about (2012)
Even more generally, I think there&#x27;s something to be said about the difference between two different mentalities, presented here in caricature form:<p>1. The world is tainted. Everyone is doing it wrong. I&#x27;m thinking about a great way to solve things. You people should stop doing the bad thing. Come on, everyone. Let&#x27;s do things right. Why is everything so bad? Why is life unfair? Why is our legacy so messy and complex? Let&#x27;s start over. Let&#x27;s set things straight. Justice, peace, correctness, truth, beauty. If we just think very hard, and come to a consensus, then we can implement something much, much better.<p>2. The world is exactly the way it is. I&#x27;m not exactly sure why. Historians are working on it. The institutions that we exist within distribute power in a certain way. Matter is heavy and resistant to change. I don&#x27;t really know how to &quot;improve&quot; the world, and if I tried, I may just make it worse. Why are you talking about abstract nonsense like &quot;justice&quot; and &quot;truth&quot;? This is just how it is. This is what we have to work with. We are lucky if we can make a few incremental improvements.<p>As in so many cases with two extremes that end up fighting unproductively, the vast middle ground is where the interesting stuff happens.<p>David Chapman... incidentally a contributor to the UNIX-HATERS handbook, decades ago... has a terminology with which I think my persona #1 would be called an eternalist and persona #2 a nihilist, roughly speaking.<p>And he wants to sketch out a persona #3, who operates under what he calls the fluid mode. That&#x27;s someone who understands the viewpoints of both eternalism and nihilism, recognizes them both as incomplete, and then valiantly works to create things and change the world in a kind of liberated way.<p>So, we&#x27;re not going to resolve the question in favor of either #1 or #2. Those personas are like the two daemons on the shoulders of anyone who does programming... or politics... or law... or urban planning... or economics...<p>The world would be very different if Lisp and Smalltalk hadn&#x27;t existed, so it&#x27;s not like cutting edge cool stuff is worthless just because it doesn&#x27;t get adopted. I always like to see people encouraged to learn about these systems even if their &quot;ecosystems&quot; aren&#x27;t &quot;mature&quot; for &quot;web scale&quot; or whatever. It&#x27;s almost a matter of respect.