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From: Robert Treat <[email protected]>
To: Alvaro Herrera <[email protected]>
To: Tim Conrad <[email protected]>
Cc: Marc G. Fournier <[email protected]>
Cc: PostgreSQL-development <[email protected]>
Cc: PostgreSQL advocacy <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] What can we learn from MySQL?
Date: Tue, 4 May 2004 15:06:53 -0400
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

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

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