[TUHS] : C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary)
Bakul Shah
bakul at iitbombay.org
Tue Mar 14 06:56:59 AEST 2023
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 at 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.
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