It's not game development that brings out the yak shaving, it's programming language development. Game development is just a gateway drug because it provides so

It's not game development that brings out the yak shaving, it's programming language development. Game development is just a gateway drug because it provides so many opportunities for good abstractions to make things easier. The mistake everyone makes is thinking that they can create a programming language while also doing X, where X is whatever they had doing when they got the itch to do a PL. Really, if you want to do a PL right, you have to do it full time. Actually I'm not sure it's really a mistake, it's just that doing PL development is so much fun that there's no reason to go back to the original project, if original the impetus for it was to have fun.