A couple of years ago I ran into a old colleague at the pub who mentioned he’d quit for a while to work on a game idea. I made a joke asking if he was now making a game engine and turned out he was first instead working on a programming language to code the game in and showed me some examples of it…

That's essentially what Knuth did before he started writing The Art of Computer Programming -- build a publishing software, TeX.

Just for the record: Knuth had already published the first three volumes of TAOCP in 1968, 1969, 1973 respectively, and had then brought out the second edition of Vol 1 in 1973, and had already won a Turing award for them in 1974 — it was only in 1977 for the second edition of Volume 2 when the publishers' printing technology had become worse (from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting) that he decided to take up the problem, excited at having recently learned of digital typesetters.

That might have been the right call in ‘78. The first word processor ever only went on sale two years prior.

Publishing software capable of more than Word, not a plain text editor capable of less, the opposite ends of the spectrum

>Hacker: hmmm, first thing I need to do is build a suitable plain text editor

I think that's why there is a new one of these every week or so on HN.

a few years ago when i was learning to code, i did this as a form of procrastination instead of writing: https://github.com/smcalilly/highlighter-rails

> Hacker: hmmm, first thing I need to do is build a suitable plain text editor

Yes, sometimes, we are missing features, sometimes wanted products are not available (see Android), sometimes available products are bad...

It's normal (for us). Very reasonable, consequential.

Edit: oh, coincidences. Appeared today: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/15/speed-matters/

> Last year I spent something like 100 hours writing a text editor

...Which reveals a topic of two mindsets. This submission is about a NodeJS + Electron Forge product; I wrote my Word Processor for Android in Java, and I want to re-write it in C... And the reason is, further requirements for quality.

So, the near future opens towards an increase of products: a question will be, whether we will get many more resources with large differences in quality, or more resources of good quality.