Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big Alive
Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big
KindPaper
Published1991
StatusAlive
AuthorsRichard Gabriel
Sourcewww.dreamsongs.com ↗
The 'Worse Is Better' essay — why MIT-correctness loses to New Jersey practicality, and why C and Unix won. Required reading in every language-design argument.
1960198020002020
Created by Richard P. Gabriel
Gabriel's 1991 essay contrasted the 'MIT approach' — correct, consistent, complete — with 'New Jersey' worse-is-better: simple implementation, acceptable correctness, deployable now. Unix and C were his proof that the worse design won by shipping.
Written partly to explain Lisp's commercial decline, it became the design community's standing dilemma: interface quality versus implementation simplicity. Gabriel himself later argued both sides; the phrase survived every qualification.