The problem isn't the availability of lower quality versions of a high-quality product, it's the transformation of a formerly high-quality product into a shitty-quality version, meanwhile, maintaining the same price, or worse, a higher price, than the former high-quality version of itself.
The price tags on tools don't go down with time, but the quality of the tools certainly does.
I'm all for tiering product lines, harbor freight is doing it right by offering their top-of-the-line in the Hercules brand, a "pretty good for non contractor" line with Bauer, and then there's lower tiers for one-offs. But if I look for, and buy, a Porter Cable tool, I'm buying it because I expect a certain performance and quality, but it's in fact a rug pull right now. That should be fraud.
You're not the only one. In college I took a compilers course and we used the dragon book, to me it sucked the joy out of the magical concept of making a compiler.
Some years later I (re-) discovered Forth, and I thought "why not?" and built my own forth in 32-bit Intel assembly, _that_ brought back the wonder and "magical" feeling of compilers again. All in less than 4KB.
I guess I wasn't the right audience for the dragon book.
Do you have any links to support this? Because the commonality of all arguments _against_ has been that they make water and power crazy expensive for everyone that has to live close to the newly opened datacenters, while the DC operator enjoys subsidized land use tax, water and power.
This is to laughably misguided that it leans toward malicious.
I mean, you're talking about Elon, the Doge guy, the one who organized mass hoovering of citizens data from whatever sources he could get his grubby mitts on? That Elon?
Opposed to mass surveillance??
And then you sprinkle some commonly known truths on top to make your comment palatable ("we're being divided and conquered!"), and finally you add a dash of malicious speculation to seed some doubt against the organization ("Perhaps the EFF has been compromised!! It's a trick!!").
On the other hand, EVERY young person in my circle (my kids and their friends) is insanely privacy aware. All of that means ... we're not part of the young people anymore?
Have you tried Nim? Strong and static typed, versatile, compiles down to native code vía C, interops with C trivially, has macros and stuff to twist your brain if you're into that, and is trivially easy to get into.
It's not just its age, it's how easy it is (was?) to jump in and start writing useful code that could be revisited later on and be able to read it and understand it again.
All of these efforts to turn it into another Typescript are going to, in the end, kill the ease of use it has always had.
Nobody's talking about porting billions of lines of code, for all we know it's just for personal projects, or a learning experience.
This kind of replies is like killing an idea before it's even started, smells like the sunk cost fallacy.
OTOH I do understand the weight of a currently existing corpus in production, evidence is the ton of COBOL code still running. But still, your reply kind of sucks.
I was looking for someone else that had done this, I had the same exact experience.
That said, anyone looking into a completely static typed language that has nice ergonomics, is easy to pick up but has enough depth to keep you busy for weeks on end, and is versatile enough to be used for anything, do yourself a favor and give Nim a try.