[Python-Dev] Examples for PEP 572 (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Wed Jul 4 06:07:36 EDT 2018

On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 7:59 PM, Stéfane Fermigier <sf at fermigier.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 11:52 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 7:37 AM, Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka at gmail.com> wrote: > I believe most Python users are not > professional programmers -- they are sysadmins, scientists, hobbyists > and > kids -- [citation needed] Let's focus on France: 1) there are ~800 000 person aged 15. (Source: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1892088?sommaire=1912926 ) 2) 40% of these are pupils in the "filière générale" (Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baccalaur%C3%A9atenFrance#Statistiques ). 3) Since 2017, Python is the language used to teach algorithmics to these pupils. => We can conclude that there are at least 320 000 pupils learning Python this year, and safely assume that most of them are not "professional programmers". Note also that this number is accretive (i.e.: 320 000 this year, 640 000 next year, etc.). 4) The annual turnover for the IT sector in France (including: software vendor, service and consulting) was 54 billions euros in 2017. This probably translates to around or less than 600 000 IT professionals. How many of them are developers ? I have no idea, but I'm sure it's less that 50%. How many of them are developing professionally in Python ? I have no idea, I'd guess less than 10%, but let's assume 20%. => This gives less than 60 000 professional Python programmers in France. Probably much less. Conclusion: there are probably more than 5 times more non professional Python programmers in France (counting only the high-school pupils, not other categories such as their teachers, but also scientist, sysadmins or hobbyist) than professional programmers. Next year it will be (more than) 1 to 10. The year after that, 1 to 15, etc.

Even assuming your figures to be 100% accurate, I don't think you can accept that scaling. Are you claiming that every high school student (a) continues to use Python forever, and (b) continues to use it at a non-professional level? I find that highly unlikely.

I'm pretty dubious that these figures will correspond to the rest of the world, where you can't expect that every single high school student is using Python.

ChrisA

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