ANTLR v4 is the result of a minor detour (twenty-five years) I took in graduate school. I guess I'm going to have to change my motto slightly.
Why program by hand in five days what you can spend twenty-five years of your life automating?
ANTLR v4 is exactly what I want in a parser generator, so I can finally get back to the problem I was originally trying to solve in the 1980s.
Now, if I could just remember what that was.

http://media.pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr2/preface.pdf I wonder how this resonates with people on this community. On the one hand I love building tools, but in the other, there are so many apps I want to build... I don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time building a "generalized problem solver" for each instance of the problem I want to solve. As seen in ANTLR example, building a general tool can take years. OTOH I'm grateful of all people that have spent so much time in building amazing tools like ANTLR.

Very much resonate with me. I see building your tooling as important as developing the end product.

I want to build 10 apps that are somewhat similar from one particular perspective. So I'll build the 1 thing, which is ultimately 100x more time consuming, but many others may ultimately be able to use (in ways I could never predict). I think that's the heuristic most of us here go by.

You know what they say: the first 90% takes 90% of your time; the last 10% takes the second 90% of your time.

Every 10% feels like a new 90%. (But better than shipping and having to deal with reviews and refunds!)

It reminds me of a quote about the modern world, that if you look around you, virtually every single thing was somebody's life's work. Which makes no suggestion about how to split your time between tool building and product building, but does suggest that the tool building time can be worthwhile.

for sure, not trying to suggest building tools is not a worthy effort, just putting it in a scale with building end products