According to the Jargon File, version 4.1.2:
Right Thing (n.)
That which is compellingly the correct or appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc. Often capitalized, always emphasized in speech as though capitalized. Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable people may disagree. "What's the
RightThing for LISP to do when it sees (mod a 0)? Should it return a, or give a divide-by-0 error?"
See also
WorseIsBetter, where a different definition of the
RightThing is made, namely the MIT/Stanford approach as opposed to the
NewJersey (C/UNIX) style pragmatism (called
WorseIsBetter). In this sense, trying to achieve the
RightThing is a sort of
BigDesign or
BigDesignUpFront, which should be avoided (
YouArentGonnaNeedIt).
''The
IncompatibleTimeSharingSystem, whose
PcLosering was the canonical
RightThing
in
RichardGabriel's
GoodNewsBadNewsHowToWinBig, isn't
BigDesignUpFront
by any stretch of the imagination.''
Untrue. Adding
PcLosering to Unix would have meant making guarantees about the behavior of every single system call without exception, including that any partial work previously accomplished would be seamlessly tracked by the kernel. And this, on a PDP-11 whose hardware couldn't even recover from an interrupt in the middle of a partially executed instruction!
But hardware issues aside, still it
is a big deal to make such guarantees for any and all current and future system calls.
PcLosering is arguably the
RightThing, sure, but don't gloss over the difficulties.
You can do something the quick and dirty way, or you can do the
RightThing and do it properly. Sounds like
CantDoRightRightNow.
Used by the advertising campaign in Australia that ran for about 10 years and changed people's attitudes towards rubbish - Australia is much cleaner than it used to be. The advertising slogan was
Do the Right Thing, but without the jingle it loses something in the translation.
So IncrementalGarbageCollection is the right thing.
See
DoTheRightThing,
DoSomeThing,
GoodThing,
BadThing
CategorySuccess