“ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them”
I can&#x27;t speak about the ISO as a whole for engineering fields, but the ISO standardization process has worked out horribly for the C++ community. Not only for the issues Tim Sweeney points out, but the entire C++ standardization process is defacto a closed-off and secretive process where participation is limited to those who can physically travel from place to place and it&#x27;s painfully obvious that the quality of features in C++ are much lower than what they could have been otherwise.<p>A common claim made by the ISO C++ committee regarding criticism of the language is that these guys are volunteers working in a mostly unpaid capacity on the language, and often have to hit tight deadlines to have any shot at getting a feature into the standard, and that&#x27;s true exactly because of how arcane the ISO standardization process is. It&#x27;s this pseudo-antagonistic process where maybe one or two individuals are tasked to &quot;champion&quot; a paper in front of their peers and then everyone is supposed to pretend that there&#x27;s no politics involved and that the paper gets approved entirely on its technical merit.<p>C++ would have been much better served from ditching that and doing what Java, Python, and Rust do, have broad community feedback and input. It&#x27;s hard to imagine what beneficial features are in C++ that would not still be there had there been involvement from the broader community of game developers, embedded device developers, desktop software developers and a host of people who use the language regularly, but it&#x27;s clear many clumsy and awkward features would have been eliminated, including the now 50 ways of initializing variables, broken standard library features like std::variant, the now unusable std::regex, the minefield that is std::random, the upcoming bloated and error prone std::ranges, it&#x27;s no wonder many C++ development teams are skeptical of the utility of the standard library and just roll their own alternatives.<p>I hope no other language goes down the road of using ISO to standardize its language.