All I can say is they haven't had any trouble getting those jobs.
> are they well-paid because they are D experts, or is being a D expert merely correlated with other traits that explain their high pay?
Both. As related to me by their employers. D experience looks good on the resume. It strongly suggests that the person is not one of those do as little as possible people - that they actually like programming.
That has nothing to do with $LANGUAGE.
If you then tell me you write Java or C#, that gives me very little additional information. They’re super mainstream languages used by whole armies of “drones” who have no particular passion for the craft, but there’s also some truly passionate people out there, and I don’t know which bucket you fall into.
If you tell me you write D, or Lisp, or Haskell, that’s different. You don’t end up writing any of those by accident, so you either sought them out deliberately or you saw an oddball language and weren’t scared off. That’s definitely strong signal for “actually likes programming”.
People who know languages to write CRUD may have different professional preferences to people who know Lisp.
If we are okay with stereotyping programming languages, is it not fair to stereotype people who are fluent in said programming languages?
Also: are they well-paid because they are D experts, or is being a D expert merely correlated with other traits that explain their high pay?