libraries to applications ratio

June 27th, 2006

As I browse through Sourceforge, I can't help but get the impression that there seems to be a lot of libraries in development, as opposed to not as many applications. Is it because people have don't need as many new apps anymore, whereas technology keeps advancing and libraries for just about anything spring up, with bindings for c all the way to ruby?

Another thing is that while innovative or useful apps are pretty far between, the same things are often reproduced countless times. I cannot remember how many im chat clients I've seen over the years, meanwhile gaim remains the reference point. But even with so many clients, there hasn't been one that was actually great. So why do people start new im projects? And since they are, why aren't those new projects better than gaim and all the "old" apps we have? And how many CMSs do we really need? There isn't a forum system out there that rivals vbulletin on functionality (phpbb is primitive in comparison), but there are countless frontends for xinelib, even though they're all the same and still inferior to mplayer, which has been around for ages.

:: random entries in this category ::

1 Responses to "libraries to applications ratio"

  1. erik says:

    So step up, the world needs you ;)