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

[Jeremy Hylton]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 13:11:38 -0500 (EST), Stephan Deibel
<sdeibel at wingware.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> > 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.

Thanks!  I didn't know the numbers from which to guestimate, and it's
nice that they are in agreement.  This seems like a satisfactory
back-of-the-envelope answer.

Jeremy