D always struck me as not sufficiently better than C++ to justify the litany of downsides to using a relatively obscure language. To find a niche, it basically needed to be what Carbon now promises to be - something that can seamlessly integrate with existing C++ code.

They actually started down that path, https://dlang.org/spec/cpp_interface.html, hence my remark.

Depressing that even a PL savant amongst us has to go and ply his trade around town instead of being financially independent.

You are absolutely right. Many languages, libraries and tools are crucial for the software industry and the whole world.

And yet in 2022 we still have to beg employers and donors to keep those projects running.

Yeah, it sad to think we have 100 f*cking think tanks endowed by billionaires that serve mainly to drive wedges into our democracies, yet nothing like that for PL geniuses that I'm aware of.

Perhaps its not that important

If one PL doesn’t do the job, another will.

If we don’t get fusion, we die. That’s what the Princeton IAS is for.

PL?

Programming Language.