An enjoyable and stimulating read. The original essay, by virtue of a few semantic ambiguities (what is "simple" anyway?) is apt to invite this sort of commentary.If I have read this correctly, the author eventually agrees that worse really is better, with the clarification on what this means outlined in the first part of the essay.
However, I was hoping to see a deeper analysis of how the nature of the evolutionary pressure in his domain contributed to the worse is better effect (I am an evolutionary biologist, so I find this kind of thing interesting). For example, if the "product" in question was a mathematical concept of interest to professional mathematicians, there almost certainly be a niche space in which version of the concept exhibiting "consistency, completeness, correctness" will dominate over the competition. For mathematicians consistency and correctness are strongly selected for (completeness, broadly defined, is usually much harder to obtain). For a the average iPhone app, these things still matter, but in a very indirect sense. They get convolved (or low passed, as Alan Kay describes) with other concerns about shipping dates and usability and so on. I would be interested to see a classification of different domains in which "worse is better" and "the right thing" philosophies dominate, and those in which they are represented in roughly equal proportions.
However, I was hoping to see a deeper analysis of how the nature of the evolutionary pressure in his domain contributed to the worse is better effect (I am an evolutionary biologist, so I find this kind of thing interesting). For example, if the "product" in question was a mathematical concept of interest to professional mathematicians, there almost certainly be a niche space in which version of the concept exhibiting "consistency, completeness, correctness" will dominate over the competition. For mathematicians consistency and correctness are strongly selected for (completeness, broadly defined, is usually much harder to obtain). For a the average iPhone app, these things still matter, but in a very indirect sense. They get convolved (or low passed, as Alan Kay describes) with other concerns about shipping dates and usability and so on. I would be interested to see a classification of different domains in which "worse is better" and "the right thing" philosophies dominate, and those in which they are represented in roughly equal proportions.