Re: [HACKERS] What can we learn from MySQL?

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 03:06:53PM -0400, Robert Treat wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 April 2004 15:12, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > You know, that's kind of the point of all things related to MySQL.
> > "It's better than nothing." PostgreSQL doesn't do things because "it's
> > better than nothing." <snip>
> > (Same as how MySQL guesses the result of a modulo operation, and gets it
> > wrong. They don't care and you can read that on the manual. In
> > Postgres, this is a bug.)
>
> Hey Alvaro,
> are you familiar with "worse is better" philosphy in software development and
> how that leads to adoption rates?

Yeah, I've read about it. I'm not sure which side of the do I sit on,
though. The wikipedia entry may be a good read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Note that it puts correctness and consistency after simplicity, but this
not means that they are completely put away. I think SQL (as in "SQL
standard") is not modelled after this idea: SQL tries to be complete
rather than simple. I may be wrong though. Certainly MySQL does away
with completeness and tries to achieve simplicity, while the opposite
could be said of Postgres.

Fortunately, Postgres has apparently caught up with developer mass, so
it may yet be able to win against MySQL ...

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"Linux transformó mi computadora, de una `máquina para hacer cosas',
en un aparato realmente entretenido, sobre el cual cada día aprendo
algo nuevo" (Jaime Salinas)