I'm a professional programmer, which means I spend a lot of time staring at various displays. Recently I've been having some problems with my eyes, so I went to talk to several doctors, which all gave me different recommendations as to how bright the background of the room should be in comparison to the display's brightness. It was very confusing, as some of them even agreed with counter-arguments of others, which made it all even less clear. So I'd like to ask the professional programmers, as people who actually have some experience with that.

Some of the doctors said that looking at a monitor is like looking at a book, so the brightness ratios should be approximately the same. Others said that background should be as bright as the display itself, because then there is no brightness difference at the edges, and that's what may cause eye fatigue.

From my own experience, I can say that reading a book isn't the same as writing or debugging a program, where you have to pay close attention to each symbol, and in books most words are easily recognizable without focusing too hard on them. Also, books are black on white and I myself use the default (dark text, white bg) color scheme for my IDE, but I've seen some programmers use mid-bright text on very dark background color schemes.

So I'd like to ask what are the recommended display/background brightness ratios for programming?

I'm not sure this site is the right one for this kind of questions, so if you know a better one, please comment.