[Haskell-cafe] How many Haskell programmers are there?

[Malcolm Wallace]

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