> There have been many promising attempts to fix these problems but they've only shown up as non-standard features in specific implementations. It's similar to the "curse of Lisp" - everyone does their own thing and no consensus emerges to move the standard forward.
> But it could be worse if the standard were "feature oriented" rather than eliminating the limitations and flaws by cleanly generalizing the model.
Why do you feel that "eliminating the limitations" is the way forward, and not standardizing common tasks instead, making them ergonomic, uniform, fast?
I don't think that more power can lead to those. Maybe ergonomics and uniformity can happen by accident if a library emerges as the default option for a task, but speed, I don't think it can.
> But it could be worse if the standard were "feature oriented" rather than eliminating the limitations and flaws by cleanly generalizing the model.
Why do you feel that "eliminating the limitations" is the way forward, and not standardizing common tasks instead, making them ergonomic, uniform, fast?
I don't think that more power can lead to those. Maybe ergonomics and uniformity can happen by accident if a library emerges as the default option for a task, but speed, I don't think it can.