Your response, colored for me by the downvote I received roughly when you posted it, consists largely of hand waving. Maybe my perception of PL research papers is horribly skewed, but the ones I've read are as I described: conjecture unsupported by evidence. The fact that some researchers are trying to do better is laudable, but it doesn't redeem the field of PL research as a whole.

This bit in particular struck be as absurd:

>Trust me, there is no glory to be had in this game

Humans naturally crave fame, and programmers are no exception. Look at all the developers with Github and Twitter profiles and blogs; are you telling me these people don't want attention?

Inventing a programming languages is one of the few ways that's been shown, on occasion, to make a programmer famous. We all know who Larry Wall, Matz, and Guido are. Frameworks, both front-end and back-end, are another (and I suspect that's part of the reason why we're up to our neck in JS frameworks). Look at DHH, for example. He's a programmer of modest ability who got so famous through Rails that Alan Kay quotes are mis-attributed to him, meanwhile I doubt you know who Daniel Veillard is, despite him being the principal author of LibXML2, one of the most heavily-used pieces of software in the world.