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Comment by ativzzz | Hacker News Reader

> where the custodian would think it is good enough to set in stone

While it's nice to be able to have a "complete" language, a language that receives no updates or changes is a dead language. When people use the language, are interested in making it "better" (in their mind at least), they are building community, holding discussions and overall generating interest and keeping the language alive and useful.

If you don't allow people to make any changes, then these people will lose interest and abandon the project, and slowly over time it will die.

There are some exceptions, like C that are so embedded in everything that it doesn't matter (it still gets updates sometimes), but languages like python or java or ruby where there is no clear "best" have to be competing with one another for people to choose that language

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Has the buzz for Java ever come from Hot New Features? As I recall that buzz was 80% marketing budget from Sun then Oracle, the stability of the platform and the ready availability of programmers.

If anyone ever picked Java for its features, their judgement should be questioned. The thinking might well withstand that questioning, but it isn't an obvious choice on the basis of features. I mean, Java itself is an obvious choice - but not because of its features. You can show me languages with much better feature-sets and I'll nod, agree then recommend Java for production use. The features just aren't the selling point.

Java was in real danger in the seven years that it took to go from 5 to 7. Very little of substance was added and it didn't appear like there was a path forward to get any real new features added to the language.

Yes, Java is not the language to use if you want the hot new PL ideas in your language. But languages need to continue to move forward because it's not like PL research is dead either.

I think Java does a really good job now at being conservative with what they add while still keeping things modern enough that people aren't abandoning the language. Once features have proved themselves in other, less conservative languages, the Java team can add them, with the benefit of seeing what sorts of problems might arise.

No, but new features have staved off competitors from taking over Java's buzz. If Java still had the feature set of Java 8, it would have lost a lot more market share to other JVM languages like Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, etc.

Common Lisp hasn't seen any language updates since 1994 and yet people here keep talking about it.

The standard hasn't been updated. But progress happens in implementations and libraries.

Sustained standardization mostly harms/ruins programming languages.

That said, it would be good to see a Common Lisp standard which cleans up outstanding issues (like whether, when an exit point for a dynamic control transfer is chosen, are the inner exit points below it torn down before the transfer takes place, or tear-down-as-you-go?)

And also standardize some common practices.

A standard way to include special characters in strings would be nice. The C-like escapes perhaps: \n newline, \u123F for unicode and whatever.

I totally agree.

Common Lisp is mostly an esoteric hacker's toy (unpopular statement here) and it falls into a unique niche that isn't used by many

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