[thebigspacefuck]

The SO chart shows Erlang is actually highest at $120K salary. Also note the median years of experience is 13. Making $110K after 13 years is not all that great. The chart would be more useful if it showed a trajectory over time for each language. Overall I don’t think this chart should influence anyone’s decision to pick a programming language.

I worked with a few teams using Clojure and there was nothing magical about it. One of the Clojure teams’ API was very thoughtfully done and reliable. Another Clojure team s’ API was a mess and caused loads of issues. I suspect the first team chose Clojure organically and the second team picked it due the SO salary.

[yomkippur]

The problem is that learning a niche language like Clojure should demand a higher salary but it doesn't. Companies realize they can get an existing experienced developer to learn it. It's also not wise to jump ship to a niche language like this unless you really have the funding for it and even then, the talent pool is much smaller and you find yourself its not an employers market in that niche.

So as a business owner by choosing clojure:

- I can't afford to lose experienced clojure devs but my budget is fixed

- I am going to be constantly requiring onboarding, training existing non-clojure devs

- I simply cannot reverse this decision.

To me the third point is the biggest risk but back to your point, it can become unmanageable unless you have the best and the brightest.

In any other language, you could still operate the business with middle of the pack but with these niche languages the risks are just much higher. It would require a Product Manager or even a CTO with extensive clojure background and those would be even harder to find and keep.

Like the SO survey shows, not everybody is willing to pay top dollars for a clojure dev and this should make anyone pause before jumping into it.

I personally liked clojure but the tooling was still painful like working with Java. Readability wise its a nightmare and if your entire team quits, there is a very good chance your business will fail, as it is that much harder to scale up your team or find experienced talent who now feel they are owed a much higher wages (which they should).

Nim on the other hand is more promising. It doesn't have any radical shifts, it still reads like Python and its very fast. But it doesn't even show up in the SO survey which makes me think its far too early.

[diordiderot]

I've heard the argument that using niche tech is a good way to retain good engineers who you'd pay a lot anyways

[hiptobecubic]

The Haskell community refers to this as "the Haskell tax," although I think all niche languages suffer it.

[celdon25]

I was one of the few professional F# devs at a time when F# was ranked #1 in pay (though that wasn't why I used F#). Spoiler alert: The pay difference is not large enough to be worth making a career decision off of. Use the languages you are the most happy with. Niche languages that get paid well don't seem to have a steady spot on the list.

You can't get paid the big bucks if you get forced out of a job for poor performance, and in this economy, expect that to be a real risk.