From the comments on the article "This reminds of The Lisp Curse. It's so easy to make a slightly different and potentially slightly better Smalltalk that many

From the comments on the article "This reminds of The Lisp Curse. It's so easy to make a slightly different and potentially slightly better Smalltalk that many people end up trying. The resulting noise makes it difficult for substantial improvements to be recognized as such." - this is another way of talking about being forced to use it; it might be possible to build a better JavaScript or Visual Basic or Bash, but if you try the dominant one which is tightly coupled with a large popular system will have a lot more momentum. The force drags people to it, and stops it splintering into twisty maze of implementations all alike.