The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

Hmm, what is the highest paying JS job you have seen/heard of? I am not particularly good and by far the highest quote I've ever gotten was ~100k euro after taxes. Not bad at all but required relocation.

Just how much can a skilled JS dev get paid?

"The good news, though, is that 34.7% of respondents learning to code are using C++, placing it in the top 6 programming languages of that category."

One of the problems C++ has is that this doesn't mean much. In the late 90s when I was an undergrad at college, the main language in the curriculum was C++...

... except it really wasn't. It was a dialect subset of C++ that was what undergrads could wrap their minds around. It was basically C with classes, and even then, the undergrads did a lot of copying and pasting around that whole class thing.

I remember when I was a TA in an early class for the majors, and the central staff updated GCC to a version with namespace support in the middle of one my labs, and suddenly every person in the class had their programs break simultaneously, because this version of GCC had namespace support, and now everybody needed "using std;". Fortunately I could read the resulting error message and worked the problem out in about 10 minutes, but none of the "people learning C++" knew what namespaces were.

I occasionally glance at C++ learning programs the schools are using. They haven't meaningfully changed.

So, a lot of those people "learning C++" really aren't. I expect your average bachelor's degree holder in a programming degree couldn't tell you about move semantics, or explain what exceptions really do in C++, or any number of the sorts of details you need to call yourself a C++ programmer in 2023, let alone a skilled one. C++ is so big.

In the context of this discussion Perl is an exception that proves the rule.

There are no Perl jobs because Perl was supplanted by Python and Ruby and embarked on a disastrous Perl 6 journey.

This will not happen to node.

JavaScript is and will continue to be for the next 10 years the most popular programming language ("popular" == "most jobs") because it has monopoly in the browser.

As a result JavaScript will continue to be used in other domains (backend, desktop, mobile) due to sheer number of JavaScript programmers. Quantity is a quality of its own.

So node (and deno and bun) will continue to be used and there will be plenty of jobs for JavaScript programmers ("node" programmer is 90% JavaScript programmer and 10% "node specific APIs" programmer).

Of all programming languages that you worry might disappear in the future, JavaScript is at the end of the list.

There have been a million things hyped as alternatives, and even though it is very easy to argue retrospectively that they were not really alternatives, they definitely were hyped as much or even more than e.g. Rust is hyped these days.

think Java and Go. I have already _lived_ an era where I thought C++ would eventually be replaced with Java and I would have to learn Java (this was so long ago). The effect was so pervasive that e.g. universities started teaching Java instead of C as their introductory language. Why would anyone want to manage memory manually, ever again? Benchmarks were showing Java as beating C++ in some algorithms, and theoretical papers appeared about how some kind of programs are much easier to optimize for JIT VMs than classical compilers. Everyone thought it was just a matter of time until classical compiled languages were irrelevant. Even in the embedded space (and Java made significant inroads). The effect was so big I was actually convinced to start up learning Java ... only for C++ to eventually prevail over Java.

The last time this happened was with Go. Every single week there would be an article here in HN about Go this and Go that, or how Google is rewritting their C/C++ codebases into Go. Turns out, they did not. You then start to hear retroactive justifications about how Go was actually a "services" language instead of a C replacement (despite the fact it was literally sold as a C replacement made by the creators of C itself no less).

Nowadays we get articles about Google rewriting their codebases into Rust.

It's a demand side issue. Most C++ jobs are maintenance jobs. Most maintenance jobs are at low-growth companies who can't justify the TC of engineers at high-growth companies to their board.

There are pockets of the C++ ecosystem where this isn't true (e.g. HFT).

But bottom-line, it's a business thing, not a skills thing. There are also a lot more C++ devs than the zeitgeist would suggest. Far too many to cause a "COBOL effect" where supply constraints on talent dictate market price.