It's far simpler than you think It all boils down to NIHS - "not invented here syndrome" Between developers being suspicious of anyone else's work, and their

It's far simpler than you think It all boils down to NIHS - "not invented here syndrome" Between developers being suspicious of anyone else's work, and their innate love to build things they'll use (your wheel is cool, I guess...but MY wheel does THIS!) ...you get a gajillion libraries that overlaps 95% of the time (but never on the 5% you "care" about) Eons ago David Pogue wrote in his review of Word (98, I think) for the Mac, "MacWrite fit on one floppy disk and had 95% of all the features I've ever needed in a word processor. Word take a CD, and has 96% of all the features I've ever needed in a word processor." Why is Word so big? Is it because a 'word processor' needs to be that big? Why are there so many libraries with incredibly weird interdependencies (version 1.9.2a of this lib needs 2.1.x2 of that one, not 2.1.x3 or 2.1.g7; but if you have version 1.9.3 of this lib, you can use 2.1.x2 up through 2.1.x9 ot he other one)? Same thing - somebody somewhere sometime somewhy decided to use that library in their own stuff, and is now forever and always bound to it (...until they refactor or rewrite a perfectly good tool that was in Scala into Haskell)