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This simply isn't true. Only C/C++ people have ever cared about having multiple implementations and have to cling to the catastrophe that those two standards are because of it.

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Somehow Python people, Java people, Ruby people, JavaScript people managed to produce multiple independent high-quality implementations.

On top of that, there so many lisp implementations, it's not even funny anymore.

python has 1.5 implementations pypy is close, but not that close to being a complete implementation.

Jython is pretty complete though, and IronPython is not completely dead.

Micropython can be counted as 0.25 or something :)

There's a difference between having multiple implementations, even high quality ones, and caring about it. Python is all about the reference implementation, as much as I wish that people cared about pypy and the JS community has always been openly hostile to SpiderMonkey compatibility and only cares about V8 in my experience. And Java is all about different forks of the same jdk, even if several actually independent different ones used to exist.

I will admit to not being familiar enough with Ruby to say anything about that

Oh, “only C/C++ people.” I.e. the people who wrote almost all the systems code in the last 40 years. Just those people.

> Because single implementation languages are toys. Any real language will have a multiplicity of implementations for different purposes.

I think that's what the parent was replying to, not somehow claiming C/C++ people are insignificant.

The catastrophe was that the C/C++ specification left too many things open for interpretation. Regarding "Only C/C++ people": there is at least one more language (Go) that has two implementations (the gc compiler and a gcc backend).

I didn't say only C/C++ had several implementations, I said that only the C/C++ communities care about their alternate implementations. The python community looks at pypy like a weird novelty and doesn't use it. The JavaScript community is often actively hostile to SpiderMonkey (firefox) and JavaScriptCore (Safari). As far as I've seen, GccGo is mostly ignored.

> This simply isn't true. Only C/C++ people have ever cared about having multiple implementations and have to cling to the catastrophe that those two standards are because of it.

This comment is so blatantly wrong and detached from reality that it makes me wonder if it's just a good old fashioned troll.

You'd be hard-pressed to find any production programming language which does not have multiple independent implementations.

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