"ISO Standardisation is the kiss of death" -- guess who?
I don't know, and at this point I don't greatly care. What counts is whether it is _true_. The existence of ISO standards for C, C++, C#, and Javascript does not seem to have resulted in the death of those languages. Nor, despite Microsoft's probable hopes, has ISO/IEC/IEEE 9945:2008 resulted in the death of Unix. And the kiss of ISO standardisation does not seem to have even slowed the Unicode monster down. (Where isJirel of Joiry when you need her?) Some standardisation efforts may be a bad thing. The path to ISO Prolog was marred by years of NIH bike-shedding which made it years late and still has not resulted in as much convergence as those who sweated blood on it would wish. It's not necessarily ISO that is the problem. The ANSI Smalltalk standard with its inconsistencies and sloppy proof-reading appears to have been a dead letter from its birth. 16 years later and I *still* cannot expect a simple thing like opening a file to work the same in the eight Smalltalk systems I have. What counts for the development and growth of a programming language is the community behind it, and Haskell is blessed with some really amazing people. However, it remains true that some companies expect to outlive their suppliers, and that the existence of a standard gives them some confidence that avoiding things outside it will reduce their risks. That's all.