Part of it may be the high degree of leverage. A compiler potentially reduces the effort required to get a computer to complete a desired task by several orders

Part of it may be the high degree of leverage. A compiler potentially reduces the effort required to get a computer to complete a desired task by several orders of magnitude. It's also kind of exciting to bootstrap a machine as well. For example going from bare metal to a C compiler to a Linux kernel to being able to browse the web.