From: Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>
Subject: Re: Cheers for DISTINCT ON
Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:51:19 -0500
Organization: cbbrowne Computing Inc
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	<20080107161812.GS18581@crankycanuck.ca>
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ajs@crankycanuck.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
-- 
"cbbrowne","@","cbbrowne.com"
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/advocacy.html
"Generally in war  the best policy is to take a  state intact; to ruin
it is inferior  to this.  To win one hundred  victories in one hundred
battles  is  not the  acme  of skill.   To  subdue  the enemy  without
fighting is the acme of skill."  -- Sun-Tzu, The Art of War