If you're a programmer I'd say Arch or Debian then configure as per your needs. As long as you don't do things blindly it will be very stable and blazing fast.
In my experience, Manjaro is a great, user-friendly version of Arch. YMMV, but I highly recommend it!
I used to be a pretty hardcore Manjaro evangelist (and I still recommend it to people who want to quit distro-hopping), but I've been burned a handful of times by it. Arch is obviously a notoriously unstable distro, but Manjaro in particular can lead to some nasty issues. Especially if you're mix-and-matching AUR packages with the Manjaro repository ones; I've had at least 3 or 4 systems get entirely borked because of an untracked dependency or something being too far behind in the Manjaro repo.
I think manjaro suffers breakage too much. These days I tell people to look into endeavour since they still use (mostly) arch repos and thus cause much less breaking with the using AUR packages if you're into those.