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The annual Stack Overflow developer surveys often include lots of bad news. "People still use PHP," for example, is a recurring and distressing theme. "Perl exists" is another.
But never before has the survey revealed something as devastatingly terrible as the 2017 survey. Using PHP and Perl are matters of taste. Extremely masochistic taste, certainly, but nobody is wrong for using those languages; it's just the programming equivalent of enjoying Adam Sandler movies. But the 2017 survey goes beyond taste; it goes into deep philosophical questions of right and wrong, and it turns out that being wrong pays more than being right.
Developers who use tabs to indent their code, developers who fight for truth and justice and all that is good in the world, those developers have a median salary of $43,750.
But developers who use spaces to indent their code, developers who side with evil and probably spend all day kicking kittens and punching puppies? Their median salary is $59,140.
Source: ArsTechnica
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Sunday June 18 2017, @08:28AM (2 children)
For anyone else that missed it, here's a link to the actual source [stackoverflow.blog]. Apparently Ars Technica doesn't want to send traffic to the people that make the actual content, so they made the only link to it a vertically-aligned, light grey, small-print "Stack Overflow" alongside the image. I thought it was part of the image at first, only found it when I viewed page source searching for the URL.
Also, I think the chart comparing salaries for tabs vs. spaces by language is more interesting than the tab vs. space argument itself. If their data is accurate, it looks like Clojure is a good choice if you want to get paid well, tabs-vs-spaces be damned, followed by Rust and Elixir as long as you're willing to follow the Cult of the Spacebar. Go makes a decent showing for both, but if you're an adherent to the Church of the Tab, you should probably stick to Perl; it's second only to Clojure among the tab users.
How do you lisp-haters like that? ;)
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday June 18 2017, @05:14PM (1 child)
So the TLDR; version is people working at hip startups using hip languages get paid more. But because to work at a hip startup typically means living somewhere the cost of renting a one room studio hovel will cost more than a house note on something with a actual rooms, a garage and a yard elsewhere, you aren't really ahead of the game.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday June 18 2017, @09:14PM
Clojure and Elixir being so high could also be related to their host platforms. Elixir's a BEAM language, so it gets the advantages of Erlang with a nicer, Ruby-like syntax. Similarly, Clojure targets the two major managed platforms, JVM and CLR, along with being one of many langs to target Javascript.
Maybe the message here is that good languages for those platforms is valuable to people invested in them? That, and in Clojure's case, being able to use the same language in all three environments is likely a benefit as well. That's been the argument for nodejs -- same language on client and server -- but it's a stronger argument when the language isn't javascript.