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Which Programming Language Pays the Best? Probably Python
Nerval's Lobster writes: What programming language will earn you the biggest salary over the long run? According to Quartz, which relied partially on data compiled by employment-analytics firm Burning Glass and a Brookings Institution economist, Ruby on Rails, Objective-C, and Python are all programming skills that will earn you more than $100,000 per year. But salary doesn't necessarily correlate with popularity. Earlier this year, for example, tech-industry analyst firm RedMonk produced its latest ranking of the most-used languages, and Java/JavaScript topped the list, followed by PHP, Python, C#, and C++/Ruby. Meanwhile, Python was the one programming language to appear on Dice's recent list of the fastest-growing tech skills, which is assembled from mentions in Dice job postings. Python is a staple language in college-level computer-science courses, and has repeatedly topped the lists of popular programming languages as compiled by TIOBE Software and others. Should someone learn a language just because it could come with a six-figure salary, or are there better reasons to learn a particular language and not others?
Ada is paying me ~$140k
It's the problem domain, not the language. Front-end webdev seems more concerned with language fashion, and kernel work still scoffs at anything but C, but in-between language doesn't seem to matter that much.
I've most of my career writing no-UI usermode code, and employers haven't much cared which language I knew. It's sort-of moved from C++/C#/Java being interchangeable to Java/C#/Python, though many hiring managers still seem skeptical of Python as a "real language" (I expect that will change over time).
It's not your ability to bang out code in any language that will advance your career anyhow - whether tech track or management, it's one set of leadership skills or another that come to matter most.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's not really fair. There are really only two versions: Python 2.7, which is mostly backward compatible earlier Python 2.x, and Python 3.x, which is a new, incompatible language similar in spirit to Python 2. The stated reason for radically breaking compatibility with Python 3 is "because Unicode". I don't much buy that, but whatever. Python 3 uptake has been slow because of the backward incompatibility, but it's clearly the future of the language. At the same time, Python 2.7 is still by no means a bad language, as long as you don't care about Unicode.
There's also Jython and IronPython, but those aren't official versions of the language.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Big Data isn't a fad. It's what built Google and Facebook into the companies they are today, and the applications for it are growing rapidly in tons of non-tech fields. Sure it's a buzzword, but a useful one since there wasn't previously a way to describe the various aspects of it succinctly.