"And it's up to the rest of the world to bet money on one guy's whims and desires eh? "

This is an old debate. No one is asking anyone to "bet money" on anything.

I am just saying the languages rising to dominance these days (vs in the eighties) seem to be driven by "benevolent dictator" types (Ruby, Python, even Clojure]. [here is a counterpoint for you. Haskell is an exception] and, yes, a single canonical implementation with a download page.

A lot of very competent people seem to be fine "betting on" these languages. Or are you saying anyone who uses Python or Ruby is stupid because they don't have committees or standards?

Clojure is very much "the whim of Rich Hickey" and is doing just fine.

Now perhaps you have some special caution that leads you to avoid these languages. That's fine.

"what happens when your benevolent dictator has holes in his understanding of programming languages? "

Oh you mean like the lisp folks didn't understand static scope in the beginning? ;-).

From Richard Gabriel's (one of the people on the Common Lisp Committee) paper "A critique of Common Lisp"

" Every decision of the committee can be locally rationalized as the right thing. We
believe that the sum of these decisions, however, has produced something greater than
its parts; an unwieldy, overweight beast, with significant costs (especially on other than
micro-codable personal Lisp engines) in compiler size and speed, in runtime performance,
in programmer overhead needed to produce efficient programs, and in intellectual overload
for a programmer wishing to be a proficient COMMON LISP programmer."

That doesn't sound very much like they had "hole less" knowledge of language design does it?

Every language in existence has "holes", depending on your view point. So what?

Look plenty of languages have been successful without deep programming language (semantics) understanding "embedded" in them. The languages with committees ( COBOL. Common Lisp) are hardly cutting edge research languages now are they?Success has little to do with programming language "understanding".

So the answer to "what happens when your benevolent dictator has holes in his understanding of programming languages?" is "any resulting problems get fixed" (e.g: ruby block scoping between 1.8 and 1.9).

"Your pet language grows up the moment industry and governments want to use it"

so by this metric Common Lisp never really "grew up" and is a massive failure? Why do you still use it then? Ruby seems to be a "grown up" language by your own idea of "grown up" (a lot of government and industry usage) and still doesn't have a committee and is very much a "benevolent dictator" language.

My idea of a successful language, fwiw is what applications were written it and how successful they were.

By this standard, CL is successful . Emacs Lisp is successful. Arc and PLT Scheme are successful. Of course Ruby, Python, etc are massively successful. Success doesn't really need a committee or a formal standard.

"not until the next big epiphany or mood swing of THE language architect"

you prefer the frozen-language-spec-by-committee leaving the language mired in the past? (Common Lisp).

I still prefer the (benevolent dictator + knowledgable community to debate design options) to industry committees.

The creators of the non committee languages (Guido, Matz, PG etc) are without exception bright, articulate people with a strong design sense and an ear to the users' opinion. Those languages have friendly knowledgeable communities. I'd rather trust them than some random business/government committee.

If that means my language isn't "grown up" then so be it :-)