Back when rocks were young, one of my hobbies was writing assemblers because the ones available were generally terrible. My first few attempts were pretty bad. The fifth or sixth assembler that I wrote was commercial quality; it was fast, had macros, supported most of the different microprocessors that our platform had, and became widely used. It's been forked and is still in active development today, 35 years later. I'm still proud of it.
But those first efforts were indeed awful, and those were preceded by even more false starts; it took 2-3 years of iteration [not full time!] to get to something that was good.
(Simple assemblers are, well, simple. But if you're in an industry where it's common to write a ton of assembly -- like the early gaming industry was -- you start gauging assemblers by the creature comforts they provide, such as a decent macro capability, cross-reference and listing support, performance, and support for chip manufacturer assembly syntax).
I've been trying to build a web-based IDE for more than 10 years. The first one was a PHP script that had write access to change the files in its own directory.
I've started over completely, at least 6 times, trying entire new languages, entire new feature sets, entire new hosting paradigms.
Each time I try again, I get closer to something professional. Each time the hacks get a little too messy and realize I'm out of my depth.
But lately less and less changes with each rewrite. I am able to pull entire chunks of code in from a previous iteration and have them work well, with little modification.
The process of writing software that's beyond one's ability is fascinating.
But those first efforts were indeed awful, and those were preceded by even more false starts; it took 2-3 years of iteration [not full time!] to get to something that was good.
(Simple assemblers are, well, simple. But if you're in an industry where it's common to write a ton of assembly -- like the early gaming industry was -- you start gauging assemblers by the creature comforts they provide, such as a decent macro capability, cross-reference and listing support, performance, and support for chip manufacturer assembly syntax).