>> There should be a name for that... but I can't think of one.
>
> useful?

Usually a more accurate description would be "only just good enough that 
it keeps anyone from making something better".

> If it does the job well and is useful to many people it certainly becomes
> popular, regardless of design or scalability.
>
> Bottom-up designed, one-shot programs that do one thing well is best design to
> me.  Too much abstraction and generalization -- that is, scalability -- usually
> derail into many conflicting interfaces and poor performance.

Abstraction is /not/ the same thing as scalability.

Abstraction is something that you might /use/ in an attempt to achieve 
scalability, but you may or may not succeed, depending on how you do it.

Scalability is a measurement of whether something *actually* scales, and 
is not directly related to how it was (or wasn't) designed.

Poor performance is the exact opposite of scalability.

(And, for that matter, it's the systems that *weren't* designed that 
usually have "too many conflicting interfaces", not the ones that *were* 
designed.)

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