Actually a nice example of a larger problem: people, even today, think of software production the way they do of any physical product. Writing the same system

Actually a nice example of a larger problem: people, even today, think of software production the way they do of any physical product. Writing the same system more than once (e.g. a consulting firm for companies' internal applications) will get economy of scale, yes, but that's missing the real point. If you're writing the same app twice, you've already screwed up. I want to say that it has to do with language selection, that the mainstream languages are set up for local syntactic sugar instead of large-scale abstraction. But then people ask what language I think they should use (I won't name names, but let's just say "something functional"), and they just say "Fuck You Lally."