> wonder if the language would be better off with a benevolent dictator who can actually get a feature out the door, even if it's less than perfect.
The history of standards is littered with such attempts, w/ and wo/ a dictator, and it never ends well. Reasons include that bad ideas/implementations become very hard to eradicate (they will have been used in legacy code); some coding standards mandate use of standard functionality even if a better alternative exists (for good reasons such as portability, but still) and they increase the activation energy to do something well.
Another value of a standards organization is a drive for solid (not necessarily fanatic) orthogonality and comparability.
C++ has suffered from some legacy mistakes (e.g. << io operations) and hasty mistakes (std::auto_ptr) and appears pretty reluctant not to get it wrong again.
Better to let some ideas get worked out in detail with some use experience before sticking them in, especially for features that can be implemented in a library.
The history of standards is littered with such attempts, w/ and wo/ a dictator, and it never ends well. Reasons include that bad ideas/implementations become very hard to eradicate (they will have been used in legacy code); some coding standards mandate use of standard functionality even if a better alternative exists (for good reasons such as portability, but still) and they increase the activation energy to do something well.
Another value of a standards organization is a drive for solid (not necessarily fanatic) orthogonality and comparability.
C++ has suffered from some legacy mistakes (e.g. << io operations) and hasty mistakes (std::auto_ptr) and appears pretty reluctant not to get it wrong again.
Better to let some ideas get worked out in detail with some use experience before sticking them in, especially for features that can be implemented in a library.