Isn't the entire point of the article that they _don't_? They say they do, but when the chips are down, the actual owner sunk their proposal "easily".

And the article also mentions that divergence is a real possibility in situations like this.

Actually the future of the language is owned by the compilers implementing it and ultimately by the users choosing which compilers to use. The committee is a mere formality that can and will ignored as needed. For example, C++ has had #pragma once for decades even though the committee still refuses to admit it.

No, ISO owns the standard, and they just shot down the committee's proposed draft.

> not having such a governing body leads to either divergence or stagnation

Or you do the BDFL model like Python, D, Zig, Odin, etc.

I think it works better. A language that reflects the vision of an individual deeply thinking about the interactions of language features, and being able to say "no" to anyone/everyone has many benefits.

Committees make me think of the Web, C++, Swift, etc., and they have a lot of "odd" decisions that have had a heavy cost. Swift has https://www.swift.org/swift-evolution/, but a lot of ideas with minority support were pushed through by Apple (for SwiftUI mainly), against overwhelming community feedback.

And the Web has had a lot of "duds" when you think of WebGPU, WASM (not saying it's bad, but people clearly want to stop writing TS/JS and they haven't made that a reality yet, at least in a way I'd call "successful"), etc.. Oh and DRM in the browser sucks. I forget the details but I was goofing around with FreeBSD Desktop and couldn't get various things to work due to some browser DRM bullshit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine if curious.

It’s pretentious to say they own the language. They own their standard. Yet every major compiler implements something else and are all called c++ compilers.