This comment is kinda snarky and borderline facetious but man, I can't help but agree. After 10 years hanging around this site if there's anything I've learned it's that I am nowhere fucking near "max geekiness". I couldn't stick with a project like this for 6 hours, let alone 6 years. And yet literally in the last week I've been (gently) ribbed for being nerdy enough to think reading books for pleasure is an acceptable leisure activity.
This is orders of magnitude of geekiness beyond anything I could possibly accomplish, and I mean that in the best possible way. Kudos to the author and thank god for the real nerds.
> This is crazy, how on earth do you have the patience and persistence to work on something like this??? It took five - six years?
Immediate gratification culture (a generational problem?) teaches us that the very short term is the meaningful range in which to work and expect results. But anyone who has become a master at their art or craft knows that 10+ year projects are normal and that the long-term is where mastery resides. In the medium term, one is often on a plateau, barely seeing significant progress. (Just ask the best cellists or figurative fine art painters or marble sculptors.)
There is absolutely no way that immediate gratification culture is a generational problem. I've worked my entire adult life in R&D for medical diagnostic devices and in those forty years nearly all the bad decisions I've been subjected to had quarterly stock results as the eventual root cause (if you dug long enough).
Calling it a generational problem is like blaming Millennials for the participation prizes that they got as kids which the adults invented, created, and awarded.
You just like it, and you keep working on it as time permits and you get unblocked. Which reminds me, I need to write up my own 4-year project (which is nowhere near as cool as this).
