I see a common thread in that comment: there's too many distros, there's too many languages, there's too much software. But there's no central authority telling people to make them. You can't force people to not reinvent the wheel; that's hubris, the third virtue of a programmer, as well as parallel invention.
If you base your solution on top of something else, like writing a DSL in Lisp instead of starting from scratch, it will still become a new language as it diverges, like Coalton. Otherwise we'd say Perl isn't a language, because its interpreter is written in C.
If these tools weren't needed, nobody but their author would use them. There's a genetic hill climb happening in every sphere of life, from film and poetry to science and programming, where every new thing either sets a new threshold of goodness, or is forgotten when it fails to. Sooner or later things stabilize, when the new solution is not better enough to outweigh the old one: we used to see many version control systems, but only Git remained, because for all its flaws, something like Jujitsu or Pijul weren't as much better than Git as Git was than SVN. We measure how close we are to convergence not by the size of the population, but by the average age of the used solutions. By that metric, software is cooling.
There is no problem to solve: nobody is writing enterprise software in a bespoke SKI-combinator derived language they found on Rosetta Code, nor paralyzed by choice between 275 Linux distros to put on their server. The duplication of effort is a cost offset by dysfunctional application and maintenance of solutions designed by committee. Simplicity does not precede
complexity, but follows it.
If you base your solution on top of something else, like writing a DSL in Lisp instead of starting from scratch, it will still become a new language as it diverges, like Coalton. Otherwise we'd say Perl isn't a language, because its interpreter is written in C.
If these tools weren't needed, nobody but their author would use them. There's a genetic hill climb happening in every sphere of life, from film and poetry to science and programming, where every new thing either sets a new threshold of goodness, or is forgotten when it fails to. Sooner or later things stabilize, when the new solution is not better enough to outweigh the old one: we used to see many version control systems, but only Git remained, because for all its flaws, something like Jujitsu or Pijul weren't as much better than Git as Git was than SVN. We measure how close we are to convergence not by the size of the population, but by the average age of the used solutions. By that metric, software is cooling.
There is no problem to solve: nobody is writing enterprise software in a bespoke SKI-combinator derived language they found on Rosetta Code, nor paralyzed by choice between 275 Linux distros to put on their server. The duplication of effort is a cost offset by dysfunctional application and maintenance of solutions designed by committee. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.