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

Jeremy Hylton jhylton at gmail.com
Mon Dec 13 21:08:56 CET 2004

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

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