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

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? It basically states that simplicity is the
ultimate design goal over correctness, consitency, and completness.  Because
of this more people are able to quickly adopt a technology, which allows the
incorrectness/inconsistency/incompletness to be address by new comers and
gradually bring the software up to higher standards.   I was reading some
blogs the other day that applied this to PHP's adoption rate over Java and
.net, but your comment made me think this really applies to my$ql and
postgresql as well. check out
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1121502&postcount=2 for a bit
more.

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL