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Good enough is good enough (2013)

by Alex Martelli for Our culture’s default assumption is that everybody should always be striving for perfection – settling for anything less is seen as a regrettable compromise. This is wrong in most software development situations: focus instead on keeping the software simple, just “good enough”, launch it early, and iteratively improve, enhance, and re-factor it.

However, while the debate is still raging, reality has steadily been shifting away from “the right thing” (inherently “Cathedral”-centralized, with “Big Design Up Front” a must, conceived with academia and large firms in mind, and quite unsuited to always-shifting real-world requirements) and towards “the NJ approach” (suited to “Bazaar”-like structures, agile and iterative enhancement, dynamic start-ups and independent developers, in a world of always-shifting specs). In this talk, I come down strongly on the side of “the NJ approach”, illustrating it and defending it on both philosophical and pragmatical grounds. I draw technical examples from several areas where the systems that won the “mind-share battles” did so by focusing on pragmatic simplicity (“good enough”) to the expense of theoretical refinement and completeness (the quest for elusive perfection), leading to large ecosystems of developers bent on incremental improvement—the TCP/IP approach to networking contrasted with ISO/OSI, the HTTP/HTML approach to hypertext contrasted with Xanadu, early Unix’s simplistic (but OK) approach to interrupted system calls versus Multic’s and ITS’s perfectionism.

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