Blog - /Quotes

Remember: the perfect is the enemy of the good. Asking for things that are perfect 'in theory' usually just results in things that are horrible 'in practice'.

— Linus Torvalds [original quote]

I'm not including this particular quote because it is profound, but because it is ridiculous. I strongly disagree with this sort of rationalization. To say that something "perfect" is necessarily less desirable than something "good" is a misnomer — I completely reject arguments with such a paradox as their basis. Introduce instead another consideration, like social cost, rather than moronically saying that less good is good.

On a tangent: I've also heard this used to justify why C and its ilk "win" over programming languages like Lisp. I would instead say that using C can be a better choice if one's environs would better support that (namely: working with C coders or working at a particular OS "level"), but Lisp is a vastly superior choice if intrinsic quality, flexibility, and expressiveness are the only factors taken into account.