[python-advocacy] how many python users are there?

[Carl Karsten]

Stephan Deibel wrote:
> Aahz wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 27, 2008, Laura Creighton wrote:
>>> I need a figure for a report.  Anybody got anything that is recent 
>>> and quotable?  Python users europe-wide and world-wide are most useful,
>>> but if you happen to have a very accurate one for some place else,
>>> I can use that too.
>> When Stef and I wrote our proposal for _Python for Dummies_, we used
>> this as our source for about 700K Python programmers:
>>
>> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-December/050412.html
>>
>> Given recent growth trends, I think one million users is a reasonable
>> number.  I can't find any more-recent authoritative figures with a quick
>> Google.
> 
> My general sense of the growth is that if my original guestimate in the
> referenced link was correct then it's probably around 1M now.  Of course
> multiplying a guess times another guess doesn't tend to be too reliable. ;-)
> 
> Still, I'd give it pretty good odds of being somewhere between 700K and
> 1.4M, with very many of the users utterly silent and uncountable.  It's
> really only hobbyists, sole proprietors and some startups that tend to
> actually show up in the Python community in some way.  And relatively
> few of those, percentage-wise.
> 
> BTW, it's dangerous to assume selling something Python-related means
> you have a global market size of 1M.  You can't reach them easily,
> they are hugely diverse, and many of them don't have any money.  It's
> a decent market for some things, but I wouldn't expect to sell anywhere
> near 1M books or IDE licenses for that matter. ;-)

That's why we need to know both the total that have ever typed at a >>> prompt, 
and the number of uncountables.  Lets Make Some Charts, and you can see the the 
% of the total that you have a chance to contact.  then with some math in your 
head, you can figure out estimated head count.

Which is more impressive than just counting up the countables :)

Carl K