there was one claim you made in that post that got me thinking
""No one else knows Smalltalk."
So I wonder how many developers amount to "no one".
Now my data is questionable to say the least but I dont think I am very far from the truth.
According to a quick estimate I found online there are 18.500.000 developers , around half of that are pros
Now Tiobe Index has some numbers about language popularity, widely disputed but I will use that. Unfortunately Smalltalk does not even make top 50 but I think its close to that because it used to be in the top 50 of Tiobe Index once .... so .... 50th is around 0,4% which means that smalltalk is probably at least 0.1% Now if we multiply with the total amount of developers
No | Name of Language | Percentage of Popularity | Amount of total develpers
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Java 13% = 2.405.000
2) C 6,5% = 1.202.500
3) C++ 5,5% = 1.017.500
4) C# 4,2% = 777.000
5) Python 3,7% = 684.500
6) VB .NET 2,6%
7) PHP 2,3%
8) Javascript 2,1%
9) Pearl 2%
10) Ruby 2%
11) Swift 1,8%
12) Delphi 1,8%
13) Visual Basic 1,8%
14) Assembly 1,8%
15) R 1,8%
16) Go 1,7%
17) Matlab 1,6%
18) Objective C 1,5%
19) Scratch 1,5 %
20) Dart 1,3%
26) Cobol 1% = 185.000
28) Scala 0,9%
31) Erlang 0,7%
34) Lisp 0,7%
35) Fortan 0,7%
36) Lua 0,7%
47) Haskell 0,5%
120) Smalltalk 0,1% = 18.500
I made up the position of smalltalk and its percentage but if you see how percentages are from language to language you will have to agree that I cannot be very far.
So the bad news is the sources are questionable to say the least the good news is however that we are close to the truth because the Python devs have also reported 1 million users. Now if this is so close to the truth that means two massively important things. I also know for a fact that on its popular days Delphi used to also have 1 million devs so its percentage is close to reality as well. The general picture is that the math at least seems to hold up.
So what is the conclusion out of this ?
1) The vast majority of the popular languages , apart from Java, are not anywhere near as popular as they imply. Especially Javascript with only 300k developer , by the noise they generate you would believe they are like 300 million. Once you leave the top 5 , pretty much every language is very close.
2) 18.500 is nowhere near close to "no one" its actually closer to a small town or a very large village. So definitely a significant amount of Smalltalk devs.
3) Coders use pretty much every language out there and they do not concentrate on few popular ones
On the other hand there are all sort of numbers online , one source gives Java over 6 million devs. But I do not think that the exact matter matters rather the general picture.
I have found the whole thing mind blowing to say the least and it completely reduces the meaning of "language popularity" showing that judging the popularity of the language by the noise it generates on the net is definitely a terrible metric.
I am willing to bet that Pharo has around 3-6.000 users which is definitely not bad.
Thank you for opening my eyes, I will from now on fight the illusion of language popularity.
Oh yes I loved your post, very well written, excellent work
Hey, all..
I just released a blog entry entitled:
"Why I chose Pharo Smalltalk to build my Bot project"
which can be viewed here:
I would appreciate (and probably create new posts about) any input..
Thanks!
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peace,
sergio
photographer, journalist, visionary