The Tower of Babel

We're all familiar with the biblical story - God is menaced by the increasingly ambitious and sacrilegious engineering of the earthly.

To retard the progress humans make (and punish them too perhaps), God unleashes a fractal curse in the form of multiple languages. We now have good enough automated language translation that the original story doesn't quite make sense anymore. In this day and age, a Tamashek-speaking person from Agadez would not have much trouble communicating with a Tuvan-speaking person from Kyzyl - as long as they're both equipped with a $30 android phone. If anything, the existence of many languages is a source of joy and amusement for people to delight in the aesthetics and quirks of languages.

But we can use our imagination - replace many languages with many races, cultures, governments, political and economic doctrines, religions, clans, etc. For example, Somalia happens to be one of the most culturally homogenous countries in Africa. Yet clanism has torn it apart. For Somalis, the tower of babel story is best told with clans in place of languages.

For programmers, programming languages are a perfect replacement for natural languages in the retelling of the story. Most software is made of many layers of abstrations - like an onion. And programmers don't write their scripture on reels of papyrus either - the very tools of the trade are themselves programs.

Whenever a new programming language is invented, a new onion has to be fabricated all over again nearly from the core. Sometimes bits can be reused, but there's still some bit of overhead. For example, the security most websites use is essentially the same layer in the onion - a library called OpenSSL written in C.

Most other languages simply use C bindings of OpenSSL. And this applies to a few other libraries as well - usually graphics libraries, audio codecs, cryptographic primitives, and things that interface with the kernel such as I/O frameworks and networking libraries.

Everything else has to be re-implemented. Package installers, popular data structures and algorithms, various parsers and lexers, web frameworks, regex parsers, ML algorithms, and countless other kinds of libraries.

A mystical outcoming has shredded the digital world into a dizzying spectacle of multiple operating systems, javascript frameworks, package managers, linux distributions, shells, cloud environments, python versions, lisp dialects, C compilers, SQL dialects, browsers, mail servers, filesystems, document formats, social media sites, instant messaging platforms, wordpress plugins, device drivers…

In all the pandemonium, few people have had the time to do anything really sophisticated with software. And that generates a tremendous amount of amusement, busywork and gainful employment for many programmers from all walks of life all over the globe.

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Edits:

In all the pandemonium, few people have had the time to do anything really sophisticated with software.

I realize this sounds like I'm bashing all the hard work people have put in. What I mean to say is: we're not optimally building upon each others' works, we've become siloed.