[Python-Dev] Re: Re: 2.4 news reaches interesting places

[Stephan Deibel]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> > http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/09/24/39FErrdev_1.html?s=feature
> 
> Can we extrapolate from the numbers here to get an estimate of how
> many Python developers there are?  I was asked for that number at
> workshop a few months ago and I didn't have any idea how to answer. 
> Is there a good answer?
> 
> Two possibilities come to mind.  1) 14% of developers in the survey
> work at companies that use Python.  How many developers are there? 
> Assume that 14% of them use Python.  But what's a good estimate for
> "number of developers."  Pretty rough -- number of survey respondents
> at company != number of Python programmers at company, and %age
> companies != %age of programmers.  

Supposedly there are 5-6 million developers world-wide (by various
estimates; I've no idea whether to believe them).  If you just multiply
out naively you get 700K-840K Python programmers.  There certainly are
vastly more one person Python projects than large ones, so this may not be
all that far off.

> 2) 64% of companies use Java, 4.5
> times more than Python.  Find out how many Java programmers there are,
> divide by 4.5.

I've seen claims of 3-4 million java programmers so that's 666K-888K
Python programmers.  Interestingly, this matches up with the above abuse
of statistics.

Independently by various other techniques of wildly guesstimating over the
years, I've come to a current figure of about 350K serious Python projects
world-wide.  Many are single-person projects so this does mesh w/in an
order of magnitude with the above.

- Stephan