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> Go's stakeholders do not appear to value standardization of the language This seems rather misinformed. Go has a spec https://golang.org/ref/spec https://gol

• brudgers 7y ago
  Sorry for not being clear. I used "standardization" in its established technical sense. In general technical use, standards and specifications are different. Standards are technical documents published by an independent standards organization. For example ISO in the case of the C programming language and ECMA in the case of ECMAscript (i.e. Javascript). Standards (in conventional use) have formal processes for establishing stakeholders, submitting proposed changes, acting on proposed changes, and publishing changes to the standard. Formal processes are not an inherent property of specifications. The Go specification could change in surprising ways tonight. Though it probably won't. The process for changing the Go specification can also change. Specifications are short lived. Standards are 'forever'. Fortran 77 is still Fortran 77 because of X3.9-1978. It is common for specifications to incorporate standards by reference. For example a specification might include "the program should generate valid XHTML 1.1." The standards body W3C provides a process for determining conformance with the standard https://validator.w3.org/ https://validator.w3.org/. T