[johnnyjeans]

"Worse is better" is an extremely misleading phrase. It's supposed to be ironic, not sarcastic. Unfortunately, the authors of "Unix Haters Handbook" exercised terrible judgement used it as a sarcastic pejorative. Now nobody understands what anybody is actually saying when they use it. I mean it in the original sense, where it's basically another way to express "Less is more."

SML is borderline minimalist, it's "worse" because it doesn't try to solve everybody's problems with a bunch of ad hoc language features and a stdlib and formalization larger than the entire legal code of the United States. It's "worse" because it comes with "less". You can't just import solution and start writing AbstractFactoryManager2 garbage. It's not actually worse to anybody but beancounters.