[python-advocacy] how many python users are there?

[Stephan Deibel]

Aahz wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 27, 2008, Laura Creighton wrote:
>> I need a figure for a report.  Anybody got anything that is recent 
>> and quotable?  Python users europe-wide and world-wide are most useful,
>> but if you happen to have a very accurate one for some place else,
>> I can use that too.
> 
> When Stef and I wrote our proposal for _Python for Dummies_, we used
> this as our source for about 700K Python programmers:
> 
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-December/050412.html
> 
> Given recent growth trends, I think one million users is a reasonable
> number.  I can't find any more-recent authoritative figures with a quick
> Google.

My general sense of the growth is that if my original guestimate in the
referenced link was correct then it's probably around 1M now.  Of course
multiplying a guess times another guess doesn't tend to be too reliable. ;-)

Still, I'd give it pretty good odds of being somewhere between 700K and
1.4M, with very many of the users utterly silent and uncountable.  It's
really only hobbyists, sole proprietors and some startups that tend to
actually show up in the Python community in some way.  And relatively
few of those, percentage-wise.

BTW, it's dangerous to assume selling something Python-related means
you have a global market size of 1M.  You can't reach them easily,
they are hugely diverse, and many of them don't have any money.  It's
a decent market for some things, but I wouldn't expect to sell anywhere
near 1M books or IDE licenses for that matter. ;-)

- Stephan