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Pizza has weak network effects.

The capitalization, brand recognition, and streamlined corporate franchise structure, cooperate to make it easier to launch and run a Domino's franchise, than to start a pizza joint from scratch.

But not that much easier. There is plenty of room to market better pizza for more money.

Computer systems tend to have strong network effects, there's a lot to learn and a skilled developer is, ceteris paribus, more productive than a greenhorn. Most of the value in operating systems and programming languages is in the ecosystem rather than the core.

Worse is better isn't a universal solvent, there are plenty of areas where it isn't applicable. The original essay† is about why C and Unix were eating Lisp's lunch, and is worth reading.

https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/LispGoodNewsBadNews.pdf



Sure. So to qualify what you are saying: C is better at achieving broad usage. But it is not better than Zig for writing secure software. It is not better than perl for text processing.




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