A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
I used to be heavily invested in GNU #Octave, a free #Matlab replacement. That was a bit of a more ambitious goal, because Godot isn't trying to be exactly like Unity, but Octave is trying to be exactly like Matlab. The overall problem, however, is similar.
It's a difficult, mostly thankless task. Users don't care what it takes to make it look exactly like what it's supposed to be replacing. Photoshop users going to the GNU IMP, Matlab users going to Octave, Maya users going to Blender, Chrome users going to Firefox... they all want the same thing: basically the same software, but without the fees, restrictions, or anti-user misfeatures. It is extremely draining to continuously disappoint people who aren't getting exactly the same software but without paying for it.
A few users will offer donations, but never enough to rival the budget of the software they're fleeing from. Nowadays there's better infrastructure to collect from these benevolent donors and get a steady income than when I was working on Octave. This offers some hope.
All this to say: if you're migrating to better, less enshittified software, donate if you can. If you cannot, then at least try to be kind and considerate of the smaller, more grassroots organisation and individuals that are trying to give you a comparable experience with no strings attached. :)