worse is still better

In 1989 Richard Gabriel wrote an essay trying to explain why the elegant thing keeps losing to the crappy thing. He called the crappy thing &ldquo;worse is better.&rdquo; He was a Lisp guy watching C eat the world, and he could not make the math work. The better-designed system lost. The worse-designed system won. Every time. Thirty-five years later it&rsquo;s still the only theory of software…