It’s not really “news” that Dr. John Ousterhout is no longer the Tcl leader, that happened years ago, but it’s finally been formalized:
And people at large have taken notice, something that doesn’t happen with Tcl very often.
What I think is actually interesting about it is to consider the governance models for various programming languages. It seems that Tcl is something of an exception to the “benevolent dictator” model prevalent in the world of scripting languages. Python still uses this, with Guido van Rossum being the “BDFL”, or Benevolent Dictator For Life). Perl used to, with Larry Wall, although I’m not up to date on what they do now. Ruby has Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto.
The really big, established, popular languages like C, C++ and Java have committees that run them, although even there, the original development was often by small teams or individuals.
What about other languages, like Lua, Erlang, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, OCaml, and so on and so forth? Which governance model is in use? How does it help or hinder the language’s growth and adoption?
DedaSys Journal 