Yeah, the "Common" in Common Lisp comes from committee. Lisp itself was a "basically designed overnight" language that became an incredibly popular hodge podge

Yeah, the "Common" in Common Lisp comes from committee. Lisp itself was a "basically designed overnight" language that became an incredibly popular hodge podge of a million snowflake variants and then eventually two competing attempts to standardize and clean up the hodge podge happened: Scheme (to my understanding a BFDL-like situation of a strong figure building anew, with few backwards compatibility cares) and Common Lisp (a standards committee and then some, with a bunch of backwards compatibility shenanigans to sort out). (ETA: I am a fan of Common Lisp, for what that is worth, if this sounds too critical. It's a very nice language. Some of what has made it nice was a massive committee and standards effort, very similar to the way JS has continued to evolve under TC-39 stewardship.) Also yeah, my impression of Java was that it was very design-by-committee.