[Python-Dev] Re: Re: 2.4 news reaches interesting places

[Jeremy Hylton]

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/04/09/24/39FErrdev_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.  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