13 Mar
2023
13 Mar
'23
9:56 p.m.
In hindsight Algol68 may have been the last committee designed
language that was good. It got a lot of flack back then but its
imperfections seem tiny in comparison to most of the languages
designed since then.
On Mar 13, 2023, at 1:48 PM, Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'd rather see programming language standards committees restrict
their activity to regularizing existing practice. Let vendors and
others innovate by adding non-standard extensions. Then take those
that are really useful and adopt them as part of the standard. But
the committee itself should not be doing design. We all know what
they say about "design by committee", and it's all too true.
Programming language standards committees also tend to suffer from
what I call the "dog and fire hydrant" problem. The committee members
are like a pack of dogs, with the standard being the fire hydrant.
Each dog doesn't consider the fire hydrant "theirs" until they've
pissed on it. Programming languages get treated the same way by
standards committee members.