Davey Shafik posted recently a very interesting article making the case for PHP. It’s not about comparing programming languages capabilities, but especially concerning access to people and market penetration. Davey pointed to an old post that gives an estimation of Perl, Php, Python and Ruby Programmers availability according to most popular search engines. I updated the estimation so we can have most accurate results. The table below illustrates the results found, I have just truncated Bing results to 1M to have more readable chart, after all I don’t believe there are 50M resumes indexed by Microsoft – and that’s another topic.
| PHP | Perl | Ruby | Python | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 788000 | 57000 | 14100 | 26300 | |
| Yahoo | 541000 | 377000 | 41500 | 82400 |
| Bing (MSN) | 59700000 | 10200 | 18400 | 4900 |
Programmer’s Resumes in Search Engines
5 Comments on "How Many Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby Developers Are There ?"
A good programmer have the knowledge and the ability of learn any other language easily. A good programmer focus his resume not in a language.
The question is know how many of those people can clean his own ass without help.
These are just estimates of people having their resumes online. I don’t have myself my resume online.
I’m curious how these numbers compare to .NET developers. We’ve traditionally built in .NET and ASP, but are considering PHP because it appears there are more PHP developers out there than .NET…but we don’t have any hard data to go on. Any thoughts on the .NET vs PHP population?
I wanted to use this data in my research, but than I looked at the actual search results. Unfortunately, php is also used as the file extension resulting in all resumes from a PHP driven site are reflected as PHP developers.
Using intext:php should in theory restrict the search to real php developers.
There is a definitive source for PHP Programmers at Zend.com. Zend has developed a certification process that is a great tool to not only determine the number of PHP developers, but also the skill level.
http://www.zend.com/en/yellow-pages
As of today there are 1290 Zend Certified Engineers in the USA alone.