Comment by guelo
15 years ago
Perl5 has had many OO libs but that has not helped. It is when the community standardizes on best practices and standard libs,such as DBI, that you get big advancements. Recent community efforts around "Modern Perl" and the Strawberry Perl distro are helping the language stay strong.
Another example is JavaScript's recent big leaps forward stemming from the community's embrace of jquery and the best practices from "JavaScript: the Good Parts".
Standards allow others to confidently build bigger and better abstractions. Which is the only way to build increasingly complicated software.
I beg to differ -- would Moose have surfaced had there not been a competing ecosystem of implementations? Of course it's impossible to determine, but my theory is that it takes competition to discover new ideas. It's not often you land on the obvious solution on the first try.
A more concrete example would be the standardization process of Common Lisp. Wouldn't have happened if there was not a vibrant eco-system of competing Lisp implementations. Eventually many of the ideas championed by the major implementations made their way into the CL standard. Now we have a new ecosystem of implementations and a standard for them to follow.