Funny, but note that Knuth had already published three volumes of TAOCP and a second edition of Volume 1 (1968–1973), won a Turing Award for them (1974), and had the second edition of Volume 2 in galley proofs, and even then it was only a combination of two factors (the publishers moving away from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting with a decline in quality, and the emergence of digital typesetting that he felt more comfortable handling) that led him to take up the problem. And even then, he simply wrote down a design and left it to a couple of grad students to implement over the summer while he was gone, and it was only when he came back and saw their (limited) progress that he realized the problem was harder than two good Stanford grad students could handle, and decided to take it up himself. And even then he basically started in mid-1977 and was done in a year or so (TeX78 and MF79), and only when it became very popular and incompatible ports started cropping up that he decided to (re)write a “portable” TeX and METAFONT himself (1980–1982, ??–1984). And after that there was a constant stream of feature requests so he decided on an “exit strategy” and froze the programs. And continued to do research and publish papers on the side during the years he was working on TeX/MF “full-time”.
So yeah the moral I guess is, tooling may take longer than you expect, but you must at least be trying to get away from it and back to writing. :)
Yes I like that page too, and I guess I was responding to it from memory, more than to your comment :) There's an element of truth to it but also a misunderstanding, so the story can be told in both ways. Maybe I should write this up as a webpage/blog post.
