[citation needed] -- but addressing your point without a citation, even if what you say is true, it doesn't change anything at an individual level. If you're t

[citation needed] -- but addressing your point without a citation, even if what you say is true, it doesn't change anything at an individual level. If you're trying to write a book, and you want to write a book, write the damn book. There's an infinitesimal chance that the tool you're writing instead of your book will change the world. If you're trying to write that tool, and want to write that tool, then power to you, but don't lie to yourself and tell yourself it's "for the book". Just admit you're switching focus. A close friend of mine has been trying to create a game for .. a decade or so. Every time he starts, there's always something. Instead of using, say, Unity, he tried his hand at writing a game engine. A physics engine. A programming language. Because none of the tools are "quite right". Of course, none of those get completed either because they're a shitton of work. And his work didn't change the world, because it's never completed. At the end of the day, much like many in the software engineering world, he's a brilliant mind busy optimizing ads. And he doesn't have a working game engine, a working programming language, or a game. I don't want to sound demeaning, because it's still very good experience to acquire. And in general I don't want to tell people "don't write your own a programming language". I think these things are super cool. But then if that's what you set out to do, make that your project instead, it'll have a much higher chance to actually complete, instead of sitting in an incomplete state, in a hidden unfinished repo with nobody to share it with. The common thread between all of mankind's most interesting advances: They're finished. How do you finish a project? Well... start.