Re: Cheers for DISTINCT ON

ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca (Andrew Sullivan) writes:
> On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 05:02:27PM +0100, Peter Kovacs wrote:
>> I just wanted to give my cheers for DISTINCT ON. It is a great
>> feature, I've just found a really good use for it. I am just wondering
>> why it didn't make it into the standards.
>
> Likely because neither Oracle Corp nor IBM nor (at the time, I guess) Sybase
> had an implementation they were willing to spend enough time promoting.
>
>> wondering ever since why the worse so often gets the upper-hand over
>> the better. (I am obviously having a hard time "growing-up" :-) )
>
> There is a long history in the computing literature on this, but the best
> explanation is probably still Richard Gabriel's 'The Rise of "Worse is
> Better"': <http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html>. Note that Gabriel
> himself is of two minds about that paper:
> <http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html>. I still think it's worth
> reading. Just about everything I've ever written or said turned out to be
> wrong in some sense, but it was still usually the result of the best
> argument I could make at the time.

I have heard that Gabriel has, at different conferences at different
times, taken and argued opposite positions on this; he has both argued
"Worse is Better" and that "Worse isn't Better."

Another view is "Good Enough is Better."

http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/good-enough.html
--
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http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/advocacy.html
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