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A comment on Is Smalltalk a weird cause to fight for?. Parent comment

Re:Is Smalltalk a weird cause to fight for? by fulafel on Friday December 27, 2019 @05:19AM (#21890400)
There are languages that have standards and many independent implementations, and then there are languages that that have a master implementation and others that are understood to strive for compatibility with the master implementation. This is a big difference and the latter model (followed by Python, Ruby, Clojure, C#, Java, Haskell and many others) leads to much less fragmentation.

The "implementation democracy" model has benefits, but the cost seems to be high, hurting availability of libraries. The network effect is dampened.

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Re:Is Smalltalk a weird cause to fight for? by lispm on Friday December 27, 2019 @05:46PM (#21895449)
> strive for compatibility with the master implementation

Usually the compatibility is not great and thus the lead implementation is mostly used.

> Java, Haskell

Both have standards. Java has extensive standardization.

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