Ha you weren&#x27;t kidding about the number of HA MySQL drop-in engine replacements out there, damn. At least most people follow the ANSI-SQL standard, which is something.<p>I&#x27;m not being snarky, but what are the use-cases that everyone have? I&#x27;d argue authentication and authorization would be one of the few things, and it was already solved with JSR 196 like 15 years ago. It worked, had a well defined spec, and most importantly it had interop with PAM on UNIX, Kerberos, LDAP, raw db&#x27;s, mixed mode, you name it. Everyone complained it was too enterprisey and no one used it, so they re-invented the wheel in the early 00s with Rails and Devise and Authlogic and a billion other non-standards. Transactions? Persistence? Java&#x27;s spec took care of that too, and fairly rigorously.  So I&#x27;m with 100% with you on this being a solved problem.<p>We&#x27;re making gradual progress (i.e., the option to develop in a language where the correctness of our code can be formally verified thanks to more readily available, mathematically sound type-systems) but like any society there are trends, and where there are trends you&#x27;ll have the recurrence of many old things (Interpol ripping off Joy Division) and the invention of a few new things (where are often the composition of two older ideas, or the implementation of a new idea which wasn&#x27;t computationally feasible previously but now is, or a concept from another industry like signal analysis or three-phase road traffic theory applied to our code-monkey&#x27;ing domain).<p>RE: Overall progress - Microsoft is doing some fantastic things in Powershell, effectively taking concepts like package management, man pages, and the shell, extracting the best elements from each of those, and implementing them in a consistent manner. No more choosing between systemd or init.d or other holy wars. If you want to do it differently, you effectively have a standardized interface to write your new implementation against within most of the platform. Don&#x27;t like ASP.NET&#x27;s templating system? No problem, it&#x27;s all open source, and you can swap your own in, but it&#x27;s all modular so nothing will break, and your co-workers can continue working in the traditional Razor templating.