A vote against standardization

[Alan Bawden <Alan@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>]

Here is my vote against official standardization.

I will limit myself to briefly remarking on the dangers of the "First
Strike" theory of programming language standardization:

    If the good guys (us) don't get together and make a standard, then the
    bad guys (them) will do it and screw up.  Therefore (even though we
    don't really want the hassle of standards bureaucracy) we had better do
    it first.

This argument attempts to encourage a stampede by playing to everybody's
insecurities about losing control of the language.  It is dangerous to
place too much weight on this argument, because you can find yourself
saddled with a standards process that in fact -nobody- really wanted (not
even the people you perceive of as the "bad guys").

If a critical mass of the Scheme community decides that it will participate
in an official standards committee, then there will be a standard, no
matter what the rest of us might think.  But I hope that if that happens,
the members of that critical mass will have decided to participate on the
basis of arguments -other- than the First Strike theory.