Are we in the worst of all possible worlds?

Good people are constantly being supplanted in favour of the greedy and sociopathic, over and over and over again.

Imagine if Gary Kildall had made the deal with IBM as was supposed to happen, instead of Gates.

http://www.tomrolander.com/GaryKildall/In%20memory%20of%20Gary%20Kildall.htm

Gary Kildall tried to push elegance in software. Imagine sane computing. Imagine if this person had influence over computing that Gates ended up having.

Actually, I can't imagine it, because some other monster would have come along. The demons are everywhere.

The human race is comprised of mostly nasty, selfish monsters. Our being conscious is a mistake and we shouldn't even be here, but that is a topic for another day.

People who try to do good seem to get stopped before they go too far, while the greedy monsters are completely free to run amok.

>>6

how well things do in the market is only tangentially related to how actually good it is. [...] it also reveals uncomfortable and profoundly depressing truths about the world we live in - success in the ``real world'' isn't much related to any of the things they care about.

Actually it reveals a much more depressing truth: your definition of "good" as having an "elegant design" or any other such property has no relation whatsoever to any conventional aspect of good, such as being pleasant to use, empowering, and so on.

"Worse is Better" consistently wins over "the Right Thing" from every imaginable underdog position not because of some inscrutable marketplace magic, but because the Right Thing is invariably a piece of useless shit. Very consistent, elegant, and absolutely pointless.

Software is meant to be used by people. Since you don't have anything resembling a mathematical model of a programmer, you can't design a programming language, operating system, or the tiniest library that would be useful to a programmer from the first principles, with nothing but logic and reason.

For example, the C++ iterator hierarchy rings true in the sense of mathematical beauty. It feels discovered, not invented, it comes from the Erdős's Book. It's also one of the worst things about C++, has been making people's lives miserable since '98 and still continues to do so because of a simple fact: 99.9% of the time you need an input iterator so all trade-offs we have to live with are pointlessly painful. "99.9% of the time you need an input iterator" is not a fact that you can discover by thinking about the beautiful and elegant structure of your programming language.

Of course, this truth is so profound and depressing that every single smug lisp weenie and their ilk can't bear to face it, and prefers comfortable lies about the world being an evil place with no respect for beauty or goodness.