> Personally, I value that aspect highly because it means if I choose to work with a language that I can understand, read, and possibly contribute to the compiler if needed.
You would have about the same if the compiler were written in a lingua franca. For whatever it's worth, I have in the past had to work inside the gfortran compiler, and I wouldn't have been able to do that if it were written in Fortran.
Self-hosting (which nowadays often isn't "full" self-hosting, it's implementing a frontend and possibly parts of a mid-end only and letting a framework like GCC or LLVM do the rest) is useful because it proves that it has reached a certain level of maturity, as you say. Another advantage is that this gives you a non-trivial piece of software written in the language which can be used for testing and benchmarking. If you introduce a compiler bug, there is a certain likelihood that you will notice it immediately. This might not be the case if you only had small toy programs to test with.
You would have about the same if the compiler were written in a lingua franca. For whatever it's worth, I have in the past had to work inside the gfortran compiler, and I wouldn't have been able to do that if it were written in Fortran.
Self-hosting (which nowadays often isn't "full" self-hosting, it's implementing a frontend and possibly parts of a mid-end only and letting a framework like GCC or LLVM do the rest) is useful because it proves that it has reached a certain level of maturity, as you say. Another advantage is that this gives you a non-trivial piece of software written in the language which can be used for testing and benchmarking. If you introduce a compiler bug, there is a certain likelihood that you will notice it immediately. This might not be the case if you only had small toy programs to test with.