Sometimes doing a formal standardisation process too early can result in stifling innovation. I’m too young (at 36) to have insight in to the C development processes, but I suspect that having competing compilers trying out different things will have resulted in a better language in the long run.
It’s in many ways similar to the way the early web was developed, different browsers tried out many different additions, copied the better ones and improved them. The standardisation process we now have didn’t exist back then, and has been through a number of iterations itself since (the “xml every thing” process that ended with xhtml had a questionable outcome at best).
Some may argue that a formal standardisation process should have started earlier, before IE became too dominant. But I’m not too sure, IE was incredibly innovative and introduced some important technologies and apis, before stagnating.
In fact the “modern” html/css/js standardisation process is specifically lead by individual browsers implementing and trying out new additions, with formal acceptance dependent on other browsers also implementing it. It’s inherently a implementation lead standardisation process, not necessarily committee led.
>Sometimes doing a formal standardisation process too early can result in stifling innovation.
Realistically, I think the most likely outcome if there's a formal standard is similar to C: You end up with one compiler that adds extensions to the standard language that are too useful to ignore, and then ~everyone copies them anyway. The most useful extensions are then standardized in the next version of said standard.
Meanwhile, some poor suckers will be working in We Must Follow The Standards hellscapes and will have to stick to the ISO version, and they'll be completely left behind by the community.
The early web with every browser doing something else was terrible for website authors. A lot of the innovation in the web started when there finally was standardization so that these fancy features could actually be used reliably across browsers. You are representing that history in a completely wrong light here.
The web is a completely different beast though. You can reasonably target only one compiler, even if you lose some platform support. You cannot reasonably support only one browser.
It’s in many ways similar to the way the early web was developed, different browsers tried out many different additions, copied the better ones and improved them. The standardisation process we now have didn’t exist back then, and has been through a number of iterations itself since (the “xml every thing” process that ended with xhtml had a questionable outcome at best).
Some may argue that a formal standardisation process should have started earlier, before IE became too dominant. But I’m not too sure, IE was incredibly innovative and introduced some important technologies and apis, before stagnating.
In fact the “modern” html/css/js standardisation process is specifically lead by individual browsers implementing and trying out new additions, with formal acceptance dependent on other browsers also implementing it. It’s inherently a implementation lead standardisation process, not necessarily committee led.