"This requires getting all of the framework, gem, and plug-in authors everywhere to agree on standards for everything."
Let me flesh it out a little bit more.
I'm not suggesting there be a canon. I'm thinking of the way github does gems, where the gems are all namespaced with a username. There could be 20 versions of array#sum, but the one that the pioneers/influencers/cool-kids-who-write-frameworks decide to use is the one that gets used. If someone decides to go their own way, someone else will fork and fix.
Maybe conflicts could be detected at the gem level via gems exposing the names of the monkey patched methods they contain.
Honestly I think git/github fundamentally changes some things and that we as a culture haven't yet fully adapted our thinking to the new possibilities.
Of course there will always be problems, and maybe this is utopian crazy talk, but the natural "that can't possibly work" reaction might be worth questioning.
EDIT:
Allow me to go from just crazy to total nutter: a language market where the commodity is semantics and the currency is popularity. If it were given influence over language design would it be an improvement over the benevolent dictators (Larry/Matz/Guido) or an epic fail?
Let me flesh it out a little bit more.
I'm not suggesting there be a canon. I'm thinking of the way github does gems, where the gems are all namespaced with a username. There could be 20 versions of array#sum, but the one that the pioneers/influencers/cool-kids-who-write-frameworks decide to use is the one that gets used. If someone decides to go their own way, someone else will fork and fix.
Maybe conflicts could be detected at the gem level via gems exposing the names of the monkey patched methods they contain.
Honestly I think git/github fundamentally changes some things and that we as a culture haven't yet fully adapted our thinking to the new possibilities.
Of course there will always be problems, and maybe this is utopian crazy talk, but the natural "that can't possibly work" reaction might be worth questioning.
EDIT:
Allow me to go from just crazy to total nutter: a language market where the commodity is semantics and the currency is popularity. If it were given influence over language design would it be an improvement over the benevolent dictators (Larry/Matz/Guido) or an epic fail?