worst-is-best-notes

why is this worse is better?
Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It
is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface.
Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.

Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is
slightly better to be simple than correct.

Consistency-the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be
sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts
of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either
implementational complexity or inconsistency.

Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is
practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be
sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed
whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be
sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially
worthless is consistency of interface.

Node is a Programming System

The Go programming language was conceived in late 2007 as an answer to some of
the problems we were seeing developing software infrastructure at Google. The
computing landscape today is almost unrelated to the environment in which the
languages being used, mostly C++, Java, and Python, had been created. The
problems introduced by multicore processors, networked systems, massive
computation clusters, and the web programming model were being worked around
rather than addressed head-on. Moreover, the scale has changed: today's server
programs comprise tens of millions of lines of code, are worked on by hundreds
or even thousands of programmers, and are updated literally every day. To make
matters worse, build times, even on large compilation clusters, have stretched
to many minutes, even hours.

Go was designed and developed to make working in this environment more
productive. Besides its better-known aspects such as built-in concurrency and
garbage collection, Go's design considerations include rigorous dependency
management, the adaptability of software architecture as systems grow, and
robustness across the boundaries between components.

Go is a Programming System.

Some examples:
Language, Editor, OS, Packaging, Monitoring, Debugging, Compiling, Testing,
Verification, Collaboration, Source Control.

LISP, emacs, lisp machines, CLOS, DSLs, explicit use of code as data, MIT, better is better.
C, text editors, make, Unix, diff + patch, email, New Jersey, worse is better.
Ruby, sublime, rake, os x, heroku, gem, git, Heroku, Rake, rails, web startups.
Haskell, hackage, cabal, category theory, quickcheck.
Objective-C, X Code, Cocoa Pods, iOS, OS X.
Perl, CPAN, cgi-bin, unix, TMTOWTDI, system administration.
Java, Maven, Eclipse, JUnit, Spring, design patterns, the enterprise.
C#, .NET, Visual Studio, CodePlex,  Team Foundation Server, Windows, the enterprise.
Go, gofmt, go, go get, godoc, TODO(chas), distributed systems.
Javascript, web browsers, the DOM, selenium, HTML, CSS, UI.
Javascript, node, npm, github.
Erlang, TODO(chas) erlang stuff.

Timeline:
GNU Project started in '83, Miranda '85, Erlang '86, Worse is Better '89,
Haskell '90, CERN httpd '91, GNU/Linux'92, WWW (CGI Start) '93, CPAN conception
'93, Matt's Script Archive '95, Viaweb '95, Apache Web Server '95, PHP '95, ASP
1.0 '96, Nagios '96, CGI RFC '97, CPAN web-accessible '97, Google '98,
ASP 3.0 (dead) '00, Rails '05, Go (conception) '07, Node '09, Go (release) '09

Node wins really heavily on packaging and easy onboarding, everyone knows JS,
even people who would never do webbackend otherwise. (Echos of PHP)

Go wins on concurrency, distributed systems, and easy building and packaging.

The web is a foundationally worse-is-better platform. (The internet is too.)