[codingmyway]

That dream is one that many have tried to achieve but it's what I call the software paradox: any system or framework that is capable of doing everything is so complex to learn and configure that it's nearly always easier to build something bespoke from scratch

[oblio]

I don't think that the complexity is unbounded. The Java standard libraries and the .NET BCL are really big, true, but you don't need to use all of them to use them. They're quite neatly segmented.

The fact that we have both libraries is due to reasons mostly outside of software development and computer science concerns (licensing, politics, etc.).

I don't see why for any non-vertical domain, in theory, we couldn't manage the complexity of having just one huge standard library available to Java, C#, Python, Ruby, etc.

Verticals are another story, that's where things get scary. But I wouldn't put medical imaging libraries in the standard libraries, anyway :)

[ryanbrunner]

> I don't see why for any non-vertical domain, in theory, we couldn't manage the complexity of having just one huge standard library available to Java, C#, Python, Ruby, etc.

I think you can look to pre-existing multi-language ecosystems like the JVM, .NET, etc. that show that this isn't always the greatest idea. Languages have different idioms and ways of approaching problems, and using a standard library geared towards a stateful, OOP language is going to feel out of place and awkward in a functional language (and vice versa).