[hardwaresofton]

While standards and committees might be slow to implement changes, their existence certainly does not mean some language/technology has stagnated. By your logic, the web has stagnated.

Most experienced engineers are glad about the existence of a standard/committee. This is what lets people build stuff that can inter-operate. Without such specifications written somewhere, people are going to build random shit that doesn't work together because of small differences in implementation

[tptacek]

This is a pretty silly comparison, because the web is changing so fast that people regularly express concern that it's evolving too quickly.

IRCv3, meanwhile, hardly changes IRC at all.

There's no indication from the IRC standards work that IRC is heading in the direction that people who use Slack need it to go: it's not going to index channels, it's not going to allow long message lines, it's not going to deliver previous messages to users who join channels, &c &c.

[hardwaresofton]

@tptacek:

> This is a pretty silly comparison, because the web is changing so fast that people regularly express concern that it's evolving too quickly.

This only serves to prove my point -- standards/committees do not imply stagnation. Also, I think you're conflating common complaints about web development (frameworks, libraries, paradigms) with core work done by W3C and friends.

> IRCv3, meanwhile, hardly changes IRC at all.

> There's no indication from the IRC standards work that IRC is heading in the direction that people who use Slack need it to go: it's not going to index channels, it's not going to allow long message lines, it's not going to deliver previous messages to users who join channels, &c &c.

Just because something changes doesn't mean it's necessarily getting better. If you have looked into WHY they do not make those changes, then it should be clear to you whether they will nor will not make those changes in the future. My bet is that someone (or multiple people) on the standards committee do not think that is the purview of IRC, and those are not features it should be concerned with. If there is no good reason for them not making those changes (in your mind), then you can go off, and make your own protocol built on top of IRC that implements those desired features. This is how you build an ecosystem of composable concepts. This is how the networking stack is built. It works.

@justin_vanw

> you're ignoring that period between standardization and the release of google chrome where there were effectively no changes and no browsers that were compliant.

> Suddenly competition led to a huge uptick in the speed of change of the web.

What's your point? Competition is pretty much always around unless it's suppressed. Your complaint is not against standardization, your complaint is against the suppression of competition.

[justin_vanw]

you're ignoring that period between standardization and the release of google chrome where there were effectively no changes and no browsers that were compliant.

Suddenly competition led to a huge uptick in the speed of change of the web.