It’s because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel all the time. It sucks doing it. Lots of effort. It’s much better to build on existing stuff and maybe improve it for your needs.
But that’s the thing: is there only one wheel? Maybe wheels are a bad metaphor here, but isn’t it weird, that there aren’t any fundamentally new concepts? Unix was developed basically during the preschool years of computing and we all just kind of stuck with its concepts.
It’s because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel all the time. It sucks doing it. Lots of effort. It’s much better to build on existing stuff and maybe improve it for your needs.
But that’s the thing: is there only one wheel? Maybe wheels are a bad metaphor here, but isn’t it weird, that there aren’t any fundamentally new concepts? Unix was developed basically during the preschool years of computing and we all just kind of stuck with its concepts.
I have thought the same in my adventures into alternative operating systems.