in reply to How many Perl programmers are there?

Nobody has to register anywhere to program in perl, so absolute numbers are hard to find.

I just looked into my cpan local cpan mirrors: 

cpan-mirror/authors/id$ find . -mindepth 3  -type d |wc -l
4129

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So we have a bit more than 4000 CPAN authors. How many perl programmers actually publish stuff on CPAN? perhaps 1%? So my rough guess is 5e5, or half a million.

Other sources you could use, if you had access to them (you might actually some of the numbers somewhere on the internet): perl.org and cpan.org access statistics, perl book sales, perlmonks.org registered users, *comp.lang.perl.* posting statistics, rt.{perl,cpan}.org statistics (number of distinct email addresses), ...

All those have in common that you still get no really good numbers, but you might get a feeling for the order of magnitude.

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Re^2: How many Perl programmers are there?
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Aug 31, 2008 at 22:05 UTC

    Nice. This is a pretty insightful census method. FWIW, I recall seeing the number 2 million bandied about a few years ago but don't recall where (here?) or its qualification. If you count those who use Perl for some reason, some of the time, at work, I suspect even 2 million is conservative.

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      2 million is still a small country. I think we should have our own flag. paco for president! :)
[reply]
        You're confusing classes (and inheritance) with roles (and composition). I am a German, but I do perl ;-)
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