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

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>

From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
To: Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@dcc.uchile.cl>, Tim Conrad <tim@timconrad.org>, "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, PostgreSQL advocacy <pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org>
Date: 2004-05-04T19:04:46Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Robert Treat wrote:
> 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. 

Interesting analysis.

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