It seems the author is lamenting that most people are no longer interested in their preferred level of abstraction, and have instead focused on higher abstracti

It seems the author is lamenting that most people are no longer interested in their preferred level of abstraction, and have instead focused on higher abstraction levels that are less interesting to them. Which is fine, it just means they haven't found "their people" yet. The few meetups I go to, I've also noticed that 90% of conversations stay at surface level, the folks who prefer to go deeper were always rare, its likely that in the past, meetups tended to attract that small percentage in the first place, so there's some selection bias. In terms of language-level specifics, I will say that in 12 years of experience I have rarely ran into a problem where "soil"-level properties of a language actually made a difference. I'm not building systems-level stuff or libraries, I'm building apps and services for businesses, where IMO the surface or atmosphere-level issues are more important. It doesn't matter that Python is 1000x "slower" than some other language, up to a certain scale. It matters more that I have access to Python's ecosystem, or there are specifics in how a python app is structured that I just happen to prefer because I'm comfortable with it. This is just an example. The other issue is that most applications we write are going to fall into a handful of categories. The needs of a locally-run stateful application are going to be different from the needs of a stateless web application. For web apps, your bottleneck is rarely in the language runtime, and more in your application design, database, infrastructure, etc. Language-level enthusiasts (which is how I would describe the author) are incredibly valuable members of the community, but its not the only game in town. There are so many other dimensions to measure technology, and so many other fields to be a "hacker" in. So why do "innovation tokens" need to be spent on the language runtime?