> The tools are there, learn to use them Luke.
That's the, excuse my Huttese, friggin' point. We had versions of those tools for ages. And once we even had high hopes of using them outside of a dev's context -- the aforementioned OpenDoc for example, but even early Linux DE's seemed to have some intentions of going that route. I remember using the GNOME CORBA implementation because I needed something that would compile with a proprietary workstation C compiler (no C++).
And it's not even hard to see why we're not doing it -- money and bikeshedding. We're selling apps. Heck, we've gone a step beyond that and don't even do that anymore, we're selling services now. There are two environments where you could go beyond that -- made for hire enterprise software and open source (I've given up on academia, especially after the bachelor-splosion). But that's where the second part comes in play -- most enterprises have given up on trying to come up with some overarching architecture, things are moving too fast and there are too many managers.
Whereas there are too few in open source. Never mind that a lot of open source these days is just commercial turds, github profiling and heavily influenced by what you're doing in your day job.
Conway's Law is really screwing us over.
Yes, we have all the tools to e.g. create a desktop where you could have your favorite editor widget in all contexts, where interoperation isn't just dropping stuff into UTF-8 files, to be massaged by scripts and other applications.
I doubt that it will get better. There's a whole generation starting to fill the FAANG bullpens that never saw anything beyond the cordoned appscapes of their indistinguishable mobile devices. Maybe someone will notice that "hey, I'm using this insanely clever federated way of connecting my microservices with , what if...". Probably will end up on something like the suckless/unixpr*n pages and go a few steps too far, banging ASCII rocks together to summon the holy gopher.