Comment by agentultra

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.