Do you mean at runtime but only once at startup, like parsing a Lua program into bytecode? Or do you mean at true compile time like Zig and Rust format strings?

Yet you were even before that, the moment you made programs work at all.

I hate to be superficial, but languages without braces just feel weird to me. I can use them and have even for a paycheck, but... no thanks. Even Lua, one of my favorite languages (if not #1), always feels at least slightly weird when I use it because of do/end.

Rather, QB was the pico8 of the 1990s. Convenient, self-contained, mysterious, quasi-powerful, in-app help menu for the entire language and API, and a few built-in demo games.

I remember VB-DOS, and fondly too. It was magical. I think I used it even before VB3.