Whenever a new tech thing comes along, there's plenty of room for innovation and agility. Take StackOverflow as an example. At first it was ripe with amazing Q&A and gamification. After some years, more and more rules were put in place to prevent "gamification cheating" and dumb Q&A. Which sounds great, until you realize that those things attracts administrators. An administrators' task is to make sure the rules are followed, even at the expense of fun. That's what happened to StackOverflow, and that's why you can't ask a question without it getting closed these days.
I shot another look at the programming language V. It has it's second birthday in two months. The language seems promising, although the compiler is infested with bugs, the syntax is incoherent and things break all the time. But already the influx of bureaucrats is felt. I've filed two bug reports on the compiler, started working towards a fix in the standard lib where number parsing isn't as bad as in JS. This is a passing test:
Also, I started working on a lib. In one of the bug reports, a bureaucrat told me it works as expected — although the example I supplied crashes. The fix I proposed was rejected as it changes an obscure part of the API, and although I fixed all references in vlang itself, external third parties might be depending on the old function signatures — and this in version 0.1.14. I won't be spending any more time on V.
In some places, administrators might be a necessary evil. Like in the courts, upholding the law. And in the tax agency. And the FDA. And probably a couple of other places too. But in most places it just hurts everyone to hang on to status quo. V will suffer, as it will never take off; although Rust is much more complicated to write and maintain, it will win simply because it's already there, and they both probably have the same amount of administrators. StackOverflow will suffer, as when the next team does it, but keeps it fun, it will take over.
This is the same reason why large companies who are unable to reinvent themselves eventually wither and die. Government agencies, not so much. That's the reason we have huge problem in Sweden with a crazy amount of agencies, ever increasing taxes, and dwindling return of investment for those taxes. I am by no means a libertarian or anarchist, but perhaps some systems just need a reboot. Throw all the bureaucrats out, keep the innovators and reset the rules. Start over in full speed. That's what Elon Musk constantly does at Tesla, SpaceX and so on, and that's a winning concept. I would love to see that done at a larger scale. Bureaucrat deflation ftw!
