How can you be so certain? (2019) [pdf]
Everyone here would benefit from giving this a read, if you’re in management or an implementer.  My favorite quotes:<p>> It is not just members of the community who wishes for “just two more features.” We have a committee with 300+ members. It seems that essentially every member has a feature or two that they’d like to get into the language, and many have several. I have not changed my opinion that adding too many features could “sink C++.” <i>Remember the Vasa!</i> [Vasa]. In fact, I think that the flood of new proposals has increased since I wrote [Vasa]. I think we are trying to do too much too fast. We can do much or do less fast. We cannot do both and maintain quality and coherence. We have to become more restrained and selective.<p>> Every design has advantages, disadvantages, and limitations. We should never present a design without a serious and honest discussion of possible problems and alternatives. It is part of a proposer’s job to examine problems; “pure sales jobs” are not intellectually honest. The joint “pro- and con-papers” on coroutines written by people from “opposing camps” were immensely useful ([Use][Impact]).<p>And later:<p>> Setting goals is usually far harder than the detailed design and implementation of features. We are good technicians and we have theory and existing practice to guide us with the necessary work once goals have been established. Unfortunately, we are not good at agreeing on goals and articulating them. Often, we end up in a mess of requirements. Language design is not product development. We don’t have a high management setting fundamental priorities for us. Few of us have workplace experience for that, if for no other reason that our firms are each in a specific business. I think product-development analogies have been seriously overdone over the last few years<p>The idea that traditional product design mentalities are insufficient for programming language design is very interesting.  Indeed, a programming language’s design must answer to theoretical truths in addition to mere user feedback (this is a point brought up in the paper).  It sounds obvious that in many ways C++ is not a “product” as it doesn’t have clients in the traditional sense.  Where does the “language as product” analogy break down?