You know all those jokes that people like Linus make about Real Programmers—the ones who have hair on their chests, etc—you know those are all jokes, right? Jokes in the laughing-at-them sort of way, the way Colbert did it—not something that you're supposed to unironically buy into.
> If someone interested in a compiler doesn't download it, it's not a excuse, it's a filter. Or a warning sign.
You're so invested in gatekeeping that you're confusing the point of research with technofetishism.
Here's what Joe Armstrong had to say in "The Mess We're In":
"I downloaded this program, and I followed the instructions, and it said I didn't have grunt installed! [...Then] I installed grunt, and it said grunt was installed, and then I ran the script that was gonna make my slides... and it said 'Unable to find local grunt'."
Looks like someone needs to go dig up Joe and let him know that the real problem is that there was a mistake in letting him get past the point where he was supposed to be filtered out.
> doesn't download it, it's not a excuse, it's a filter
If it's a decently large project, sure. But if it's a small project with only a couple contributors who I've never heard of? There's the potential for that to be hiding malicious code. Plus the potential complexity of getting a project that's only ever been built on (say) 2 computers to successfully compile and run on my system. Plus figuring out whatever build system and weird flags they happen to use. And potentially wrangling a bunch of dependencies.
All that just to take a quick look at a language that might not actually be of interest to me in the end. The browser offers huge benefits here - follow a link and play around in a text box. It just works. (This is also why I use Godbolt - I don't want to bother with a Windows VM or wrangle ten different versions of Clang and GCC myself.)
I mean it's JavaScript, I don't think it's intended for you to write C compilers in it - but for compile-to-JS languages, it's a real asset to be able to run it in the browser, although more and more that can be done with WebAssembly as well. However, look at the project listed as using it - it may not even be for web languages, but just projects that need to parse something.
If someone interested in a compiler doesn't download it, it's not a excuse, it's a filter. Or a warning sign.