Ask HN: How do we make more money?

Do you remember back in the day when programmer salary was at an all time high? People could be making above $80,000 a year easily coding in FORTRAN or COBOL, or if you knew anything about computers, you could get a job?

What ever happened to this? It makes sense that as time goes on, computer literacy increases, and the demand for skilled programmers decreases. This is sadly inevitable. But what we as programmers, the skill in an age where there is not much of it, need to rise again.

We need to either invent a new wave of computing that makes javascript, PHP, web-design, Java, SQL, C++, and Indians seem obsolete. I am not talking about making something easier that out performs, I am talking about something that is harder and much more difficult to learn. The functional paradigm, for example, would be a great way to do this. Just strangle all of the conventional tutorials out of a language and make it the de facto programming language. We just need to figure out how we would do something like this: a full scale deployment to make a language like this #1.

If this seems bleakly infeasible, then where else can we go where the market is about to explode? Where just for knowing something a little bit ahead of time, you can make a decent salary? What is going to be the next silicon valley?