> It was also the single-most decision that made me lose faith in the standards committee.
When I try to think of any product or service born of a standards committee that has been wildly successful, I can't think of any.
Standards committees are useful if the goal is to bring consensus-driven stagnation (and standards), so that things can evolve around a group of products/services rather than just individual products/services. But, there have been extremely complicated standards like some of those from OASIS: https://www.oasis-open.org/ that made developers waste countless hours trying to adhere when a high level of complexity wasn't necessary. And even well-used standards like SQL have not moved quickly enough with the times, e.g. if you look at the differences between the major databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.), there are still many DB-specific features that could be standardized.
> Instead of giving us one of the most well tested SQL implementations (SQL Lite) that addresses all of the above, and much more
I wish embedding PostgreSQL would get to the point that people would think of it before SQLite, especially in situations like this that are generic, because there is so much more that could be done with it. Here's one recent effort in Java: https://github.com/yandex-qatools/postgresql-embedded and a slidedeck from a few years ago from the postgres lead at VMWare with that team's experience: http://www.slideshare.net/jkshah/pg-conf-eu2013embedded
> When I try to think of any product or service born of a standards committee that has been wildly successful, I can't think of any.
He says in a post submitted over HTTP, using DNS for name lookup, TCP for OSI layer 3 transport, implemented in client software via POSIX socket APIs, encapsulated in IEEE 802.2 frames traveling across IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.11-defined physical mediums, routed by BGP and maybe even some OSPF.
Are any of those except maybe 802.11 born of a standards committee?
off the top of my head: HTTP came from CERN and w3c was years later; TCP is the alternative to the stillborn OSI standard; POSIX is a relatively recent AT&T UNIX-clone standardization effort; Ethernet was from Xerox PARC (although most of a modern implementation is from the IEEE era)
Exactly - most of these became standards after an entity produced a good solution in the real world and it became useful to formalize them and evolve collectively.
When I try to think of any product or service born of a standards committee that has been wildly successful, I can't think of any.
Standards committees are useful if the goal is to bring consensus-driven stagnation (and standards), so that things can evolve around a group of products/services rather than just individual products/services. But, there have been extremely complicated standards like some of those from OASIS: https://www.oasis-open.org/ that made developers waste countless hours trying to adhere when a high level of complexity wasn't necessary. And even well-used standards like SQL have not moved quickly enough with the times, e.g. if you look at the differences between the major databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.), there are still many DB-specific features that could be standardized.
> Instead of giving us one of the most well tested SQL implementations (SQL Lite) that addresses all of the above, and much more
I wish embedding PostgreSQL would get to the point that people would think of it before SQLite, especially in situations like this that are generic, because there is so much more that could be done with it. Here's one recent effort in Java: https://github.com/yandex-qatools/postgresql-embedded and a slidedeck from a few years ago from the postgres lead at VMWare with that team's experience: http://www.slideshare.net/jkshah/pg-conf-eu2013embedded