A few points here: new languages is clearly the wrong joint to cut along. That would mean we would have to say that Rich Hickey was doing two different things

A few points here: new languages is clearly the wrong joint to cut along. That would mean we would have to say that Rich Hickey was doing two different things between 2005-2009 and 2009-present, it's more natural to say he was doing one thing, writing Clojure, which has distinct phases. I don't know how many developers do paid, full-time work on languages, but it has to be more than a thousand. Heavily weighted towards mature languages? Yes, of course. Harder than it should be to do what Andrew Kelley is doing with Zig, or Andreas Rumpf is doing with Nim? Also yes... probably! My bias is to say that this is systemically undervalued, but I don't know how to prove it. Lastly, if we're really trying to find the closest analogy to toolmakers in the developer community, it's going to be developer tools, not just language work. At the risk of being silly, working on languages is like being a toolmaker at a tool factory, and working on new languages is like being on a team which is bringing a new CNC mill (for example) to market. No surprise there aren't many of us! If you want to say that developer tooling is underrecognized as a profession, undersupported by the ecosystem, and so on, well I firmly agree with you. But there is no question that it's paying rent and mortgages for a lot of people, right now. It's likely that more developers want to do this than the market will bear, and I believe it is equally true that many a machinist wished that he could leave the factory floor and go work in the shop. Cranking out widgets will never be as fun as iterating on the best widget jig you can make, but without widgets to sell there isn't much of a market for widget jigging either.