Re: How many Perl programmers are there?

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.

Comment on Re: How many Perl programmers are there?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: How many Perl programmers are there? by cosmicperl (Chaplain) on Aug 31, 2008 at 23:14 UTC
With my hundred million people estimate I think you mean 100 thousand people. Thanks very much for the figures. Lyle	[reply]
Re^3: How many Perl programmers are there? by tilly (Archbishop) on Sep 01, 2008 at 02:34 UTC
No, I meant 100 million people who have jobs distributed like the jobs from that website. A tenth of a percent of them are "Perl programmers", hence the 100 thousand people estimate you see for that.	[reply]