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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  4066 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2

OS/2 let you move a window without bringing it to the front. That's the only thing I miss.

Surely someone has posted In the Beginning was the Command Line by now. Has any computer essay from the last century held up so well?





user-inactivated  ·  4066 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    OS/2 let you move a window without bringing it to the front. That's the only thing I miss.

Focus-follows-mouse and click-to-raise could give you something like that in X window managers that let you pick their focus policy.

    Surely someone has posted In the Beginning was the Command Line by now. Has any computer essay from the last century held up so well?

The Rise of "Worse is Better"?

wasoxygen  ·  4064 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    The Rise of "Worse is Better"
Yes, that's pretty good, thanks. He makes two points:

    I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.
He supports the first point well, but I don't see the values by which he makes the second claim. Is market dominance the measuring rod of quality?
user-inactivated  ·  4063 days ago  ·  link  ·  

In the sense that lasting is a mark of quality, yes. Software without users doesn't get maintained, either because no one's paying for it or because no one cares enough to do the work, and software that isn't maintained bitrots away.