[ken]

It's interesting to hear the standardization perspective, because it's pretty much the opposite of my perspective as a user.

I see the classic path of any programming language -- regardless of standardization -- is to continuously add features until it's too big and complex that nobody wants to deal with it any more. Then it's replaced by a newer, simpler language that takes the important bits and drops the unnecessary complexities. At that point, everybody sees that the older language was barking up the wrong tree, and they stop wasting time on it.

It's not the cessation of language change that causes language death -- that's merely a symptom. You can't keep a language alive simply by changing it every year. Some people sure have tried.

Alternatively, until it's evolved so much that there is so much diversity of implementation that simply knowing a library is written in "language X" doesn't tell me much about how it's written, or whether I can use it in my program which is also written in "language X".

Then again, C is the exception to every rule, so maybe we can keep piling on features indefinitely, and people will have to use it (even if they don't like it), for the same reason they started using it decades ago (even if we didn't like it).