Lots of people just like to build things and it is often easier to build a tool than it is to find a pre-existing tool that you can get, you can learn and you can use to solve your problem in less time than building something. All too often when you choose the reuse path, you end up going around in circles with stuff that may be good, but it doesn't fit your problem very well.
Also, humans are builders. It's what we do.
If you look at this problem closely, like I have over the past 15 years or so, you can already see evolution and natural selection happening. So I don't really see diversity as a big problem, and I do expect that in a generation or two, there will be a lot more consensus around which tools to use. However, even then, I do expect to see a fair amount of diversity.
Even today, where Google dominates search, they are dwarfed by Baidu in China. And in Russia, many people prefer Rambler. Orkut is a big social network in Brasil, Vkontakte in Russia, etc. Programming tools and libraries are the same, i.e. a lot of the choices are made for cultural reasons and that will never go away so some diversity will always be here.
Hopefully more people can gain the perspective that many years of experience bring, and can contribute to the process of natural selection (which implies improvement too) in order to get more people choosing and using better tools.
Also, humans are builders. It's what we do.
If you look at this problem closely, like I have over the past 15 years or so, you can already see evolution and natural selection happening. So I don't really see diversity as a big problem, and I do expect that in a generation or two, there will be a lot more consensus around which tools to use. However, even then, I do expect to see a fair amount of diversity.
Even today, where Google dominates search, they are dwarfed by Baidu in China. And in Russia, many people prefer Rambler. Orkut is a big social network in Brasil, Vkontakte in Russia, etc. Programming tools and libraries are the same, i.e. a lot of the choices are made for cultural reasons and that will never go away so some diversity will always be here.
Hopefully more people can gain the perspective that many years of experience bring, and can contribute to the process of natural selection (which implies improvement too) in order to get more people choosing and using better tools.