Editing Unix philosophy (section)

=== "Worse is better" ===
{{Main|Worse is better}}
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[[Richard P. Gabriel]] suggests that a key advantage of Unix was that it embodied a design philosophy he termed "worse is better", in which simplicity of both the interface and the implementation are more important than any other attributes of the system—including correctness, consistency, and completeness. Gabriel argues that this design style has key evolutionary advantages, though he questions the quality of some results.

For example, in the early days Unix used a [[monolithic kernel]] (which means that user processes carried out kernel system calls all on the user stack). If a signal was delivered to a process while it was blocked on a long-term [[Input/output|I/O]] in the kernel, the handling of the situation was unclear. The signal handler could not be executed when the process was in kernel mode, with sensitive kernel data on the stack.