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There are more languages that have standards, sure, but the languages you mention, at this point, and in general, are mostly relegated to historical maintenance and maybe some very specific niches. To me personally, a “mature” language that’s not really being used isn’t the goal. And if developers truly believed standardization was valuable, you’d expect this property to give them a significant leg up against the sorts of languages like Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, TypeScript, etc.

That being said, I do think, considering it longer, there are languages that I am missing, like SQL, and ones that have a spec, even if it’s not under an ECMA/ISO process, like Java and Go, that I was forgetting.

I still think that using this as a necessary condition for “maturity” is misguided.




Well, I agree that standardisation and "maturity" (whatever that may mean) are not connected, but I think most C and C++ programmers (to name two very widely used languages that I personally have a lot of knowledge of) find the respective standards for those languages very helpful, and somewhat lament the lack of formal standards for other languages they may use.


The C and C++ specs are full of UB though, more like a "minimum common denominator" for compiler devs than a strict spec that users can rely on. It's way too easy to write spec-abiding code that behaves differently with different compilers/architectures/optimizations.

Specs are definitely a good thing to have, but often they're just brandished as a bullet point without looking at the details: how good is the spec, what does it add over the existing tests/CI/RFCs/proofs, etc.


Yes. I do think that standardization is generally good. I am pro Rust getting a specification! I just think it is one pro among many, and not something required for success.




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