* Henk-Jan van Tuyl [2014-07-20 13:10:31+0200]

On Sun, 20 Jul 2014 00:17:41 +0200, Johan Larson wrote:

...

Obviously this is a very fuzzy question. But what's the credible range of answers?

The tags page of stackoverflow[0] says (when hovering over the rectangle with the word Haskell) that there are 5.6k followers. Of course, there is no guarantee that the followers are Haskell programmers, and it is certain that not all Haskell programmers are followers (I am a Haskell programmer, but not a follower).

Other numbers: * 16k reddit.com/r/haskell followers * 2k registered users at haskellers.com * 30k linkedin profiles are found for the "Haskell" query, presumably because people mention Haskell as their skill (the same caveats apply). Thus my feeling is that the number of people who are interested in Haskell and know some basics falls within 10k-100k range; the number of people who use Haskell professionally (including academy and industry) is probably between 1k and 10k. Roman

On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 06:05:28PM +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:

Hi,

more numbers: Of the roughly 150k machines taking part in the Debian popularity contest, 4936 (3%) have GHC installed, and but only 898 (0.5% ) use it: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=ghc

And that might include some xmonad users that you wouldn’t necessary consider Haskell programmers.

Users of xmonad and pandoc certainly add up to that number. Cabal-install would be a better reference than GHC, with 1467 (0.8%) users have haskell-platform installed: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=haskell-platform --- Phil Xiaojun Hu

Of course, this is not a good approximation for the number of haskell *programmers* because many people will have multiple installs going. For example, I have 4 installations (3 work + my laptop). It's probably best to think of this number as an upper bound.

Also, services like Travis will download a fresh set of dependencies on every commit.

cabal caches package tarballs under ~/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/ * Mike Izbicki [2014-07-21 09:23:52-0700]

I was assuming hackage's downloads showed unique ips. That seems much more useful at least. If not, the lens method would also be double counting every time someone created a sandbox or upgraded ghc.

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 12:41 AM, Chris Wong wrote:

...

...

Of course, this is not a good approximation for the number of haskell *programmers* because many people will have multiple installs going. For example, I have 4 installations (3 work + my laptop). It's probably best to think of this number as an upper bound.

Also, services like Travis will download a fresh set of dependencies on every commit.

---

Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

Are there many really large users of Haskell, organizations that are likely to have the sort of shared setups you describe? My impression is that most Haskell adoption has been by fairly small groups, either working independently or going their own way within larger organizations. On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 6:57 AM, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

On 21 Jul 2014, at 06:27, Mike Izbicki wrote:

...

The lens package on hackage has almost 63000 downloads. I think this is probably a good approximation to the number of serious haskell *installations* because even people who don't like lens probably have downloaded packages that depend on it. I suspect that very few serious haskell programmers don't have lens installed.

As with any large commercial organisation, we are not keen on our users each downloading the same software from external sites. We decide which Haskell packages will form part of our blessed install, and re-host them internally.

Nevertheless, I can confidently say that none of the official Haskell installations we use at work has the lens package installed. We might not count as "serious" Haskell users though, since we only have about 300 kLoC. (Separately, our own internal Haskell dialect has > 1.5M LoC, but does not use the lens package either - although other forms of lens-like stuff are in heavy use.)

I think there are no good proxy metrics for counting programmers, nor even setting upper bounds. There are just too many ways our activity can be hidden or disguised by innocent performance-optimisation, like internal caching.

Regards, Malcolm _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

-- Johan Larson -- Toronto, Canada

Pandoc wouldn't affect popcon though, since it doesn't depend on ghc; it's a binary package, and iirc only depends on libgmp at runtime. On Jul 21, 2014 6:49 AM, "Phil Xiaojun Hu" wrote:

On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 06:05:28PM +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:

...

Hi,

more numbers: Of the roughly 150k machines taking part in the Debian popularity contest, 4936 (3%) have GHC installed, and but only 898 (0.5% ) use it: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=ghc

And that might include some xmonad users that you wouldn’t necessary consider Haskell programmers.

Users of xmonad and pandoc certainly add up to that number. Cabal-install would be a better reference than GHC, with 1467 (0.8%) users have haskell-platform installed: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=haskell-platform

--- Phil Xiaojun Hu

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