100%. Look at Ruby's community. It's a pretty great community in my experience, but at the end of the day Matz, Kokubun, etc. act as gatekeepers. Democratic cr

100%. Look at Ruby's community. It's a pretty great community in my experience, but at the end of the day Matz, Kokubun, etc. act as gatekeepers. Democratic creation of software would be a disaster. There's so many philosophies of development and differing opinions that you wouldn't be able to make progress. At the end of the day the reason a language exists is to implement the vision of those who created it. The community is a labor force to implement, test, and verify the decisions made by the heads. I totally encourage people to write their own languages though. A language no one uses can be beneficial to computing at large as experiments in language implementation. We all know silly languages like Brainfuck that you would probably never use for work, but can be useful learning tools.