Reason 521: Why the vision of 'software bricks' will never come to pass

Software is an imaginary tool for solving imaginary problems.

If someone were to demand of you, "Give me a tool suitable for smashing a car window, holding some paper down on a table, and stopping a door open" you could hand them a "brick" and be done with it. Moreover, a different person completely unfamiliar to you, from a totally different culture and society could do exactly the same thing. It would be reasonable to expect both outcomes to be interchangeable.

In contrast, if someone were to demand "Write an application that tells time, beeps an alarm and keeps my TODO list, there are as many solutions as there are hands to get the job done. Moreover there is no reason to expect the solutions to be interchangeable, or interoperable in any way; absent a lot of kibbitzing and hand-holding and iron-clad edicts of standardization from which even the slightest deviation is unequivocally banished.

However, standardization and intellectual elasticity(imagination) are mutually incompatible.

Why does Perl enjoy such avid admiration (or hatred) from those who know its expressiveness (or complain that it is unreadable gibberish)? It's because those perceptions are based on imaginary constraints and purely intellectual constructs.

You cannot ask two people to write a book review on a book, and then expect the paragraphs and sentences of the reviews to be 'mix-n-match' interchangeable ... at least not without seriously constraining their imagination and creativity ... but then such constraints mean you won't really be getting a book review at all, just painting by numbers. So too it is with the realm of all 'information technology'.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, its just the way it is.