There are definite ways to standardize a Lisp, I mean look at all the awesome work Rich Hickey as done on building out Clojure. I just feel that the Lisp (huge generalization incoming) may not care for standardization in the same way Bjarne does when developing C++.
The point I was trying to make (let’s take an example Bjarne cared about that isn’t compatability) is that people in different language communities care about different things. I think it’s fair to say that Ruby developers don’t think about speed as much as people working on C++. It’s not that they don’t care, but ‘programmer happiness’ in the way Matz thinks about Ruby (having an ‘unless’ keyword for example) is more important to Matz than speed. Again, it would be crazy to say Matz doesn’t care about speed, but he, like Bjarne, obviously prioritizes some things over others.
For a college student taking the class, it may seem obvious (“well of course you should build a language focused on certain metrics”), but it’s easier said than done. I remember working on a compiler my junior year where I all I wanted to do was continually add features to my language. Often the problem with the language was with the goals I’d set forth and addressing the problem I was trying to solve, not simply adding more features.
Focus over features is the idea I think Bjarne got across super well.