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 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
