Erik Naggum: "… if you think in terms of the imminent end of the world, _everything_ is soon food for the great garbage collector in the sky and whoever is

Erik Naggum: "… if you think in terms of the imminent end of the world, _everything_ is soon food for the great garbage collector in the sky and whoever is not scrambling in panic looks like they aren't moving and have been passed by or are dying. … like, if you aren't using today's fad language in the very latest version of the IDE, you'll be left behind. aaaugh! but it's good that some people run like they are scared out of their wits. if they suddenly disappear over the edge of a cliff, a good number of people will notice in time and _not_ follow them." Of course, this was part of an email thread around Common Lisp's popularity in 1999 (https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3141310154691952@naggum.no.html https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3141310154691952@naggum...) but I think it's more broadly applicable and still relevant two decades later. Anyway, if you really want a "static" language target, perhaps push hard for official standardization (ANSI, ISO...). Standards encourage a lot of nice things, which admittedly are possible without standards, but less incentivized... For example, I can still write ANSI C as the gods intended, compile other ANSI C written decades ago, using a plethora of compilers across time (including the current year with the latest optimizations) so long as they claim to implement that standard and so long as the code is actually ANSI compliant. Such compilers might implement later standards too, or custom extensions -- but that's ok because it tends to be that I can easily make use of such code and such code can easily make use of mine à la carte! No jihad must be waged on all old code to update it under threat of being relegated to time-capsuled VMs. But regardless, things will change, even if you have an island of stability from your standard. This isn't necessarily bad, because in order for there to be any improvement, there must be change. "Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change."