People that worked on the same idea for decades

Posted by sebg 5 days ago

Comments

Comment by srl 4 days ago

"Few paintings have lasted the test of time as the great wave of Kanagawa. It took Kanagawa 40 years before he drew the wave he is most known for."

The painting is by Hokusai. Kanagawa is a place.

Comment by badlibrarian 4 days ago

He doesn't do much better on the other example. Term-frequency saturation is the important part, and he ignores the 1972 paper by Karen Sparck Jones.

Comment by sandymcmurray 4 days ago

He also made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

Comment by CM30 4 days ago

Surprisingly common in fangames and mods. Mushroom Kingdom Fusion started in 2007 at the latest, and it's not going to be done for a year or so at the earliest. So, 20 years, maybe 30 if you count predecessor projects.

Brutal Mario started in 2006 at the latest, and ended in the 2020s as far as I recall, so about 14-15 years. Of course, the 2006 demo was technically demo 6, so we have no idea when the first 5 versions were created since they seem to be gone forever.

Super Mario Star World is a remake/sequel to the Mario 64 hack Super Mario Star Road, which was made for Super Mario 64 DS instead. It seemed to start out as a sequel in the Super Mario 64 engine in 2013, then ended up as a Super Mario 3D Land mod a few years later, got retooled as a Super Mario 64 DS hack a few years after that and is currently in development by a new creator after original creator SKELUX got cancer and moved onto other projects.

In other mediums, I guess there's the Thief & the Cobbler. Started in 1964, got an unfinished/messed up release in 1993, and a better recuts in 2013 and 2023.

Comment by embedding-shape 4 days ago

Video games in general have lots of people working on their games for decades too. UnReal World is from early 90s, was released on Steam in 2016, and AFAIK still gets updates. Nethack is even older (late 80s?) and also still get updates, I guess there might be bunch of MUD with single creators who still churn out updates too. Dwarf Fortress is quite old too for still gaining in popularity.

Comment by CM30 4 days ago

Oh video games in general can have crazy development times, whether it's through an open beta/development process or a closed one. Dwarf Fortress is a good one for sure, as is Star Citizen. Also Duke Nukem Forever, and Beyond Good & Evil 2 (the latter has somehow passed the former's record for longest recognised game development time at 20 years compared to 14).

Super Mario Bros X is arguably getting up there too, started in 2009 by Terraria developer Redigit, and now in development by a new group as of 2026.

And while a Doom fan needs to check this, I remember the mod Mordeth started before Duke Nukem Forever was announced, and the later episodes ain't done as of 2026.

Comment by interroboink 4 days ago

I'm reminded of an old talk by Rich Hickey [1] (he created Closure, initially in semi-isolation over some years).

  > When was the last time that you thought about something for an
  > entire hour? ... Howabout for a whole day? ... or over the course of a
  > month? ... or a year? These are tremendously valuable moments, if you
  > get to have them at all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

Comment by jll29 4 days ago

Software

Richard Stallman: GCC and Emacs - both massive pro?ects and still going strong.

Linus Torvalds: Linux OS kernel

Science

Geoffrey Hinton: scaling neural networks

Books

Donald E. Knuth: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (vol 4c of 12)

Buildings

misc. architects and builders: (most) cathedrals (Cologne, Barcelona, ...)

Comment by WCSTombs 3 days ago

Knuth didn't write SICP, it's by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman.

Comment by phkahler 3 days ago

Knuth wrote TAOCP.

Comment by defrost 3 days ago

Knuth is writing TAOCP.

Comment by glimshe 3 days ago

Knuth will likely not finish writing TAOCP. :(

Comment by roncesvalles 4 days ago

Darwin took 21 years to publish his findings on evolution. In fact he couldn't finish the actual book that he had set out to write and published a summarized abstract instead, which is what we know as On the Origin of Species.

Comment by stevenwoo 4 days ago

Plus he would have kept working on it until Alfred Wallace wrote him a letter about coming up with his own idea independently so it was publish together or get beat to the punch.

Comment by giraffe_lady 4 days ago

A couple software examples off the top of my head are Richard Hipp with SQLite and Matthew Ahrens with ZFS. Both almost incomprehensibly sophisticated projects executed well over decades.

Neither are anything like a solo effort in the way these examples are, and it's hard to say what they'd be like without the long individual involvement.

Comment by chubot 4 days ago

I think Charles Babbage is a special case -- IIRC his son also picked up his work, after his death. So he actually worked on it for "generations", by having a child who also worked on his ideas :-)

Comment by fuzzfactor 5 days ago

Yes?

Growing up in a retirement community you would be foolish to ignore the fact that some things don't start getting good for the first few decades.

Most everybody else doesn't have such overwhelming examples, and fail to realize it until much later in life, if ever.

Comment by devld 3 days ago

Infinity project (game) https://gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2262302-a-retrospective-on-t... started in 2004. It's not the same exact game, but the developer seems to work on something similar: https://www.inovaestudios.com/Battlescape The journal / blog is very interesting btw.

Comment by soupfordummies 3 days ago

Is there just two examples or is the page not loading for me?

Shelby Foote’s Civil War history and Robert Caro’s LBJ biography come to mind.

They also make me think I may have to work on READING them for decades.

Comment by keymasta 3 days ago

For scifi: Frank Herbert and his son for the Dune series

Comment by pcrh 4 days ago

People who...

Comment by orsenthil 3 days ago

The quote by Hokusai is beautiful.

Algorithms books and material by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne is 40 year effort too.

Computer Networks, Operating Systems, Distributed Systems from Andrew Tanenbaum, same.

Comment by flobosg 3 days ago

Comment by croes 4 days ago

I guess Chris Roberts and Star Citizen will join that club

Comment by RRWagner 4 days ago

Myself, Roger Wagner,HyperStudio, 1988...1998...2008+

Comment by orsenthil 3 days ago

Wow!. Nice to meet you.

Comment by hatmatrix 4 days ago

Don't most researchers fall into this category?

Comment by colechristensen 3 days ago

Not so often the "same" idea but a related or rather narrow field.

Comment by techteach00 4 days ago

Ted Nelson!

Comment by fnord77 4 days ago

the title kind of implies there would be more than just 2

Comment by jujube3 3 days ago

Check back in a few decades, and he'll have added some more.

Comment by bananaflag 4 days ago

In fantasy:

J R R Tolkien

Janny Wurts

M A R Barker

Ed Greenwood