Exactly - with 500,000 fans there are bound to be hundreds of people with the sort of motivation needed. And there is some odd cult-of-Notch thing at work too.
Cas 
I donāt think itās all about numbers. Itās about the niche audience that Minecraft caters to: people who geek on creating big systems from the ground up.
Although Iāve never tried minecraft Iād probably fall in the same niche. When I was younger I used to script my own Runescape bots, edit save files, modify game textures, etc. Anyone remember Uplink? That was an awesome game. These things attract a particular audience, same with 0x10c.
IMO itās just a bit too low-level at the moment, although Iām sure that will change before long.
I played Minecraft once after buying for 10 bucks. Never played it again, didnāt appeal to me. The 0x10c doesnāt appeal to me either from the looks of it, but the DCPU thing, even if itās a little silly and even though there are better architectures to target, got me wasting time on writting yet another high-level language/compiler. I donāt think it has necessarily to do with the cult of Notch.
I for one love writing Assembly code. The incredibly simplicity and lack of āmagicā makes for a very clear and fun programming language in my opinion. Iām interested to see what happens. If the tools become good enough and the game is actually fun I would really enjoy programming my ship to autopilot or fly in doughnuts or whatever.
As much as I love high-level languages, with ever more exotic structures like functors, monads, continuations, restarts, and so on, I have to admit I have quite a soft spot for Forth. The PostScript dialect of it is my favorite syntax for it, but ANS feels like the best macro assembler there is. Not that I have any hopes of writing anything practical in Forth, but itās still just a hell of a lot of fun. The Forth community is full of some ā¦ colorful characters too.
I love Minecraft and I really like many of the things Notch does to support the Indie Game community. But the game 0x10c just doesnāt strike me as fun. Mojang has made so much money on Minecraft that Notch can build whatever he wants. More power to him for doing what makes him happy and for trying something really different and weird. But I just donāt understand the vision for 0x10c and probably wonāt buy it.
Forth is a really cool language (not so great as a transport IRā¦for you geeky kids that take my meaning.) Iām sad to admit that monads sometimes make my head hurt.