How many Perl developers are there in the world?

kappa on 2010-05-16T09:19:10

I'd like to have a rough estimation of the number for a talk.

First, my own educated guess. We have:

1. ~4800 active CPAN authors (from here).
2. 1% to 5% of Perl developers release code to CPAN (my own evidence from working in big and small companies).

This gets us (optimistically) ~500000 Perl developers in the world.

Then I did some research^H^H googling:

• PerlMonks thread with little data. The only interesting comment uses the same method I came up with.
• A report from November 2007
• A thread on StackOverflow estimating a total number of software developers in the world.
• A piece of news from Sun estimating Java developers in 2000

What numbers can you come with?

on black matter

andy.sh on 2010-05-16T10:16:44

You can also base the estimation on a number of people took part in the Perl survey a few years ago; there were about 4000 responses.

Your numbers resemble the 80/20 rule of the mass of black matter in the Univers. There are 4000..5000 visible Perl people, and they should be 20% of the total :-)

fix

andy.sh on 2010-05-16T10:18:25

s/resemble/don't resemble/;