A simpler and less complete design that spreads early often beats a correct and complex one.
Gabriel's 1991 essay. Unix and C spread because they were simple to implement and port; better-designed systems lost because implementation simplicity beat interface completeness in practice.
In practice
- A rough scheduling tool built in a fortnight is used by nine teams; the properly specified replacement is still in design review two years later.
- A file format that handles most cases and is trivial to parse displaces one that handles every case and needs a library.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- How technologies spread, scale, decay and frighten us