ColdFusion devs aren't cheap either, and that's definitely not a popular language these days.
It's not that devs are necessary expensive, it's that senior devs are. The problem being that "easy" languages can often lead to complex balls of mud if care is not taken, and the only way forward is to hire senior devs.
weird. i’ve seen situations where there are very few developers in the world with a specific skill. yet, because there are few companies that need that skill relatively, these developers cannot demand rates higher than rates for developers dealing in vanilla shit like javascript.
The rates might not be higher, but more to the point, their rates aren't lower either. Thus the idea that popularity correlates with pay isn't necessarily true.
right. you would think that the number of open jobs would be an indication of the rates you can command as the reasoning is that they are not filled because there is no supply.
FORTRAN devs are also pretty expensive. There are fewer people who can write FORTRAN and there is a lack of allure to a job that involves maintaining legacy code.
Sadly a lot of Ruby code written in 2010ish is also considered "Legacy" code and even people who previously did Ruby don't want to do it, not because of any destestment of the language. One company even specifically asked me if I would be "okay" with writing Ruby code from time to time.
People who need to write FORTRAN are also very specialized in other technical capacities. FORTRAN is used a lot in high performance scientific & engineering computing. So companies are paying for the ability of a person to grok the high level mathematics necessary to justify using FORTRAN.
It's not that devs are necessary expensive, it's that senior devs are. The problem being that "easy" languages can often lead to complex balls of mud if care is not taken, and the only way forward is to hire senior devs.