Worse is better

It's very apt to bring up "worse is better" because that particular rant is all about the applications programmer having to jump through hoops so that the systems programmer can save some effort.

Although people can argue that UNIX "got things about right" in comparison to competing (and presumably discontinued) operating systems which were more clever in their implementation, there's a lot to be said for not pestering application programmers with, for example, the tedious details of fsync and friends at the expense of common sense idioms that just work, like those which assume that closed files can safely have filesystem operations performed on them. Those tedious details involving, of course, figuring out which sync-related function actually does what the developer might anticipate from one platform to the next.

Sometimes worse really is worse.