> Yes, but a committee (or a community if that term has too many bad connotations) can at least argue about the design principles and on occasion decide to change them using a well-defined process (e.g. rough consensus or voting).
The underlying assumption here must be that this somehow leads to better results overall, but where's the evidence for that? "Design by committee" has a negative connotation for a reason.
> The original plan of the W3C TAG was to pull the foundations and make a fresh start with XHTML2. The browser vendors objected to that and chose to instead evolve the original HTML into what we have today.
That's because "the market" doesn't want things to break. Like I said, it should've been thrown out, but for obvious reasons it wasn't. The point is, you can't blame "the market" for having created the mess in the first place.
> But that's the point. Those trend-hopping junior developers and their bosses are the market...
They are a force within that market and it just so happens that so many new people come into the industry because "web stuff" is needed now, but it won't be growing like that forever. These young programmers will grow old and tired (and so will their bosses) and at that point conservatism will settle in, like it has in many other areas as well. It's a market fluctuation.
> The market apparently didn't bother much that HTML is now a "living standard", browser release cycles are measured in weeks and generally a software is considered dead if it doesn't receive any more updates.
The pace at which new browser features are adopted is actually rather slow, but more importantly, old stuff usually doesn't break. For example, jQuery might be outdated from a developer perspective, but it still powers a lot of stuff.
Same here, I often find myself writing a loop-and-a-half and will on occasion repeat expressions to get around extra lines (if I cared about performance, I wouldn't be writing it in Python).
I feel like a lot of the resistance is from people who think this is somehow bad style, because it's associated with a source of bugs in other languages. The same kind of people will argue endlessly against having 'goto' in a language, even when it can clearly make for cleaner code (eat it, Dijkstra!) in some cases.
"The market" took over after a long period of "design by committee" that had "strong design principles"[1] resulting in something that was both inadequate for what people wanted to do and didn't evolve at a promising pace (likely because of said principles).
When the market did take over, the problem was that those poor foundations weren't thrown out completely. You can only do so much by strapping turbines on a camel (no offense to camels). At least we can actually write (mediocre) applications with HTML/CSS/JS now.
The other part of the mess is caused by the ever-growing amount of trend-hopping junior developers
that want to try out new things - and their superiors letting them do it. If the foundation wasn't so bad, there would be less incentive to try and re-invent anything. Other platforms are fully market-driven, they didn't produce such a mess, because the market rewards stability (hence the low initial adoption rates of Python 3).
The underlying assumption here must be that this somehow leads to better results overall, but where's the evidence for that? "Design by committee" has a negative connotation for a reason.
> The original plan of the W3C TAG was to pull the foundations and make a fresh start with XHTML2. The browser vendors objected to that and chose to instead evolve the original HTML into what we have today.
That's because "the market" doesn't want things to break. Like I said, it should've been thrown out, but for obvious reasons it wasn't. The point is, you can't blame "the market" for having created the mess in the first place.
> But that's the point. Those trend-hopping junior developers and their bosses are the market...
They are a force within that market and it just so happens that so many new people come into the industry because "web stuff" is needed now, but it won't be growing like that forever. These young programmers will grow old and tired (and so will their bosses) and at that point conservatism will settle in, like it has in many other areas as well. It's a market fluctuation.
> The market apparently didn't bother much that HTML is now a "living standard", browser release cycles are measured in weeks and generally a software is considered dead if it doesn't receive any more updates.
The pace at which new browser features are adopted is actually rather slow, but more importantly, old stuff usually doesn't break. For example, jQuery might be outdated from a developer perspective, but it still powers a lot of stuff.