[Python-Dev] Re: Re: 2.4 news reaches interesting places (original) (raw)

Jeremy Hylton jhylton at gmail.com
Mon Dec 13 17:49:03 CET 2004

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:30:45 -0500 (EST), Stephan Deibel <sdeibel at wingware.com> wrote:

For example, a September article in InfoWorld said "But the big winner this time around is the object-oriented scripting language Python, which saw a 6 percent gain in popularity, almost doubling last year's results."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/09/24/39FErrdev1.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. 2) 64% of companies use Java, 4.5 times more than Python. Find out how many Java programmers there are, divide by 4.5.

Jeremy

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