Software Design: Worse is Better

For the first few articles in the Innovation & Technology blog, I will write about a few methodologies that I think are worth writing about.

One school of thought is that good engineering is about find the right solution, exemplified by the term “Do the Right Thing”. This is what we are taught in school, and trained to do in the multiple-choice exams we are subjected to from young.

Conversely, the concept known as “worse is better” holds that in software design (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Making mistakes along the way is okay, provided that these mistakes don’t kill you, and you can fix them as you go along. I like this organic concept, and it is a cornerstone of my development philosophy.

The original article by Richard Gabriel where this idea first came alive is still worth reading:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Richard Gabriel was one of the designers of Common LISP, which is an early AI programming language. LISP influenced the design of many languages. For example, Brendan Eich, the author of Javascript, has said that Javascript is a dialect of LISP with C-like syntax.