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Comment by madhadron | Hacker News Reader

> The Go way is to half-ass things.

This used to be known as the New Jersey school, and is the underlying philosophy of Unix: build a bunch of little pieces that work a lot of the time and kind of fit together if you remember the gotchas, then call it a day. There is an essay on this that I am unable to locate right now which mentions the horror of someone working on ITS when they asked how Unix solved a rollback on error case in a system call and were told, "Oh, we just leave it inconsistent, and the application programmer has to deal with it."

Does anyone else remember this citation? I truly am failing to find it this morning.

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Sounds like it might be straight from the original "worse is better" essay:

http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

> The MIT guy did not see any code that handled this case and asked the New Jersey guy how the problem was handled. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix folks were aware of the problem, but the solution was for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned that signaled that the system routine had failed to complete its action. A correct user program, then, had to check the error code to determine whether to simply try the system routine again. The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.

Ironically, that is referring to the EINTR error code that I predict is about to cause a bunch of unexpected failures when people switch to Go 1.14. [0]

[0] https://golang.org/doc/go1.14#runtime

Oh, of course. Thank you!

Worse Is Better is a form of prioritization, especially in the face of changing requirements. Right Thing assumes you not only have lots of time to polish every piece, but that the goal is a fixed point you've already decided upon, so none of your work is going to be wasted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

And I happen to agree with it.

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

jwz is redirecting this link based on referer, you might want to not click on it (copy/paste works).

Does anyone know why he dislikes HN so much?

Tbh I kind of like the attitude and I warmly recommend just clicking the link :-)

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