What is a "Perl programmer"? If you're a sysadmin who uses Perl, are you a Perl programmer? If you're a DBA who sometimes cleans data with Perl, are you a Perl programmer? If you are a biologist who uses and occasionally tinkers with tools written in Perl, are you a Perl programmer?

It is kind of vague.

Anyways if you want an estimate, Comparative Language Job Trend Graphs is informative. Unfortunately absolute numbers aren't to be found there, and there is reason to believe that it might be skewed towards technical jobs. But let's say that there are 100 million jobs out there that are distributed like those graphs say. Then about a million people have jobs which have Perl somewhere in the job description. 300,000 have jobs that say "software engineer" and mention Perl. over 100,000 have jobs whose description includes "Perl developer". And a similar number have jobs whose description includes "Perl programmer".

Let's sanity check that. According to http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos110.htm there are about 435,000 computer programmers in the USA. With my hundred million people estimate, if I add up the "foo developer" ads, that roughly matches the number of programmers in the USA. Of course not all ads for a programmer will say "foo developer", but the USA is not the whole world either. So I'd guess that the numbers I've given are on the high side, but not by too much.

In reply to Re: How many Perl programmers are there? by tilly
in thread How many Perl programmers are there? by cosmicperl

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