> If an engineer who'd be nothing special in the Haskell community can take home $400k per year slinging Java, then what is a half-decent Haskell engineer (who, most likely, makes a lot less than $400k) really worth? $700k? $3 million?
The actual language isn't worth anything. Knowing the language that my business application is written in, is what counts. COBOL is the best known example - outdated, hard to use language with no features. Yet COBOL programmers are probably, on average, the best paid programmers out there, because they work on systems that the businesses care about.
The reason a 'nothing special Java dev' is worth $400k is because there are systems that make businesses crap-tons of money out there, written in Java. Not because Java is a good/bad language.
The actual language isn't worth anything. Knowing the language that my business application is written in, is what counts. COBOL is the best known example - outdated, hard to use language with no features. Yet COBOL programmers are probably, on average, the best paid programmers out there, because they work on systems that the businesses care about.
The reason a 'nothing special Java dev' is worth $400k is because there are systems that make businesses crap-tons of money out there, written in Java. Not because Java is a good/bad language.