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Vague estimate is that there are 18 million programmers in the world[1] and that 4% of them use Go[2], so 0.7 million would be a starting point guess as the tot

Vague estimate is that there are 18 million programmers in the world[1] and that 4% of them use Go[2], so 0.7 million would be a starting point guess as the total number. Note that these were the first two Google search results I found for "number of programmers in the world" and "percentage of programmers in different languages" so... being off by a factor of 10 or more is likely. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/india-to-overtake-u-s--on-number-of-developers-by-2017.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/ind... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-develop...

dunpeal 8y ago
These numbers seem pretty accurate, and I wouldn't expect that they're off by anywhere like a factor of 10. Think about it: the number of programmers in the world is certainly not off by 10 factor - no way there are 180 million programmers in the world, only 18 of which are visible. Similarly, there's no way that 43% of programmers in the world are Go programmers, that's again quite clearly off. I think an estimate of 700k Go programmers makes a lot of sense, maybe with a factor of x2. I would very strongly doubt that there are more than 2 million Go programmers in the world.
- dvlsg 8y ago
  Kind of depends on how "go programmer" is defined, too. I've used go, but I certainly wouldn't call myself a "go programmer" at this point.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    For the their purposes, the people who would care are those who are currently maintaining a significant Go codebase. So even if you did Go full-time for 5 years, but then switched to Rust and now work full-time in Rust, you would not mind at all if the language added some backward-incompatible changes. In fact you'd probably welcome them, since often you moved away because of features the language was missing.

dunpeal 8y ago

These numbers seem pretty accurate, and I wouldn't expect that they're off by anywhere like a factor of 10. Think about it: the number of programmers in the world is certainly not off by 10 factor - no way there are 180 million programmers in the world, only 18 of which are visible. Similarly, there's no way that 43% of programmers in the world are Go programmers, that's again quite clearly off. I think an estimate of 700k Go programmers makes a lot of sense, maybe with a factor of x2. I would very strongly doubt that there are more than 2 million Go programmers in the world.

dvlsg 8y ago
Kind of depends on how "go programmer" is defined, too. I've used go, but I certainly wouldn't call myself a "go programmer" at this point.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  For the their purposes, the people who would care are those who are currently maintaining a significant Go codebase. So even if you did Go full-time for 5 years, but then switched to Rust and now work full-time in Rust, you would not mind at all if the language added some backward-incompatible changes. In fact you'd probably welcome them, since often you moved away because of features the language was missing.