[yawboakye]

> This is the same reason given for totalitarian rule generally. The problem is that the dictator has enough power to make a big mistake, committing the entire communitiy's resources. In this position, if you can avoid making a decision, you should. Toyota doesn't simply make such decisions by fiat. Instead, they have a competition.

You're comparing very different things. Programming languages and empires/nations/companies aren't the same thing. Rails has stayed on the course DHH wants it and hasn't become a mess mainly because DHH remains the BDFL. Go could benefit from similar structure. We're now about to see how Python will do post-Guido.

[munificent]

> Rails has stayed on the course DHH wants it and hasn't become a mess mainly because DHH remains the BDFL.

\* and DHH happens to make good decisions frequently enough.

For every successful BDFL example, history is littered with a hundred dead languages and frameworks designed by a single visionary leader who made the wrong decisions.

[vorg]

> a hundred dead languages and frameworks designed by a single visionary leader who made the wrong decisions

E.g. there's the namesakes for Rails and Ruby, i.e. Grails and Groovy. Virtually no-one's upgraded to Grails version 3 since it came out 3 yrs ago, or started new projects in Grails version 2. The Grails 2 plugin ecosystem is as good as dead. It only has its "single visionary leader" listed for the 3 contact persons (owner, admin, tech) in the grails.org DNS registration.

As for Apache Groovy, it's hanging on as the build language for Gradle and Android Studio, but doesn't seem to have any other significant use besides its original use case of glue code and testing harnesses. Groovy's problem is its creator, who had successfully added closure functionality to a clone of Beanshell, left the project after 3 yrs and the "despot" at Codehaus who subsequently claimed the title Project Manager was someone who didn't have the aptitude for many programming tasks.

[geodel]

So is other way round. Huge numbers of failed design-by-committee or community projects. What you say is truism not particularly insightful or useful.

[claydavisss]

The only meaningful example of this I can think of is Larry Wall and Perl...but his mistake was in loosening his grip instead of tightening it. Perl6 started off as a utopia wherein Larry was only considered slightly more powerful than any other contributor. This resulted in a revolving door of clowns taking the reigns and rapidly resigning as Larry looked on.

Fortunately Perl5 still does the Pumpking thing which is effectively a rotating BDFL.

[lizmat]

> This resulted in a revolving door of clowns taking the reigns and rapidly resigning as Larry looked on.

I would say that this hasn't been the case for the past 10 years at least. Patrick Michaud has been Perl 6 pumpking since then, to make room for Jonathan Worthington about 2 years ago. Hardly a revolving door and hardly clowns.

[eritain]

Parrot did burn through quite a few pumpkings. I wouldn't call them clowns either, but I do think they led Parrot astray. Obviously Parrot is not Perl 6, but they are closely linked in many people's minds for obvious reasons.

(It's not all the pumpkings' fault, either. I think Parrot would still have been doomed if its leadership were constantly flawless, just because it was designed before Perl 6's object system was.)