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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

I think it's due to a different focus: PostgreSQL chose to be "correct" and feature-complete, while MySQL deliberately didn't implement the full SQL standard, and went for ease of use and, arguably, the best performance.

You see this pattern all over the world, Unix versus Windows coming to mind. The best technical implementation of your software doesn't guarantee the best position in the market, even in a tech market.

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In that sense I've seen it as similar to the BSD vs. Linux camps. BSD is correctness, Linux is (often sloppy) pragmatism. Usually the latter wins.

A pragmatic engineering approach often beats the theoretic "correct" approach in most applications.

It does occasionally. In my experience, however, sometimes improving a pragmatic approach requires doing things correctly from the ground up. Sometimes the performance gain is worth it, sometimes it isn't. But generally it is there.

I don't entirely disagree. What I've found is that insistence on "correctness" is often confused with insistence on "minutiae". I suppose that in my experience the latter is usually what people mean when they talk about the former. The result is often lots of wasted resources and time fussing with tiny esoteric details that the end-user will never notice.

Correctness is certainly valuable. I've also seen projects go down long paths avoiding correct correctness due to time or resource constraints only to end up with an inferior product.

I guess a better conclusion is that a good balance needs to be struck. And I suppose that's ultimately the pragmatic approach, if the "correct" approach is better, do it, if the "get it done" approach is better, do that instead.

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