"Good enough" is good enough!
by Alex Martelli for
Our culture’s default assumption is that everybody should always be striving for perfection – settling for anything less is seen as a regrettable compromise. This is wrong in most software development situations: focus instead on keeping the software simple, just “good enough”, launch it early, and iteratively improve, enhance, and re-factor it. This is how software success is achieved!
n a 1989 keynote speech at a Lisp conference, Richard Gabriel had a “light relief” section where he caricatured a SW development approach he called “worse is better” (AKA “New Jersey approach”) and contrasted it with what he called “the right thing” (AKA “MIT/Stanford approach”)… and despite the caricatural aspects reluctantly concluded that NJ was the most viable approach, identifying several of the actual reasons (speed of development, less monolithic designs, systems more easily adaptable to a variety of uses [including changes in the underlying requirements], ease of gradual incremental improvement over time, …).
The debate hasn’t died down since (Gabriel himself contributing richly to both sides (!), sometimes under the pseudonym “Nickieben Bourbaki”). My favorite Gabriel quote is “The right-thing philosophy is based on letting the experts do their expert thing all the way to the end before users get their hands on it [snip] Worse-is-better takes advantage of the natural advantages of incremental development. Incremental improvement satisfies some human needs”.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25454244/Screenshot_2024_05_18_at_12.02.42_PM.png)
