size of XQuery developer community

[James Fuller]

partioning the question a little, I think there are 5 groups of
developers with respect to xquery:

I) developers who have done no xquery and never heard about it

II) developers who have done no xquery but heard about it

III) developers who may briefly engaged with xquery, either as a
config/bug fix/hack/maintenance/research activity

IV) developers who have spent some time doing some small projects with
xquery as a component

V) developers who have spend a significant amount of their day coding in xquery

while its not possible to nail down numbers (all the usual caveats
apply) I would venture that of the above groups that that the last two
are limited to 100's - 1000's ... its quite possible that there may be
a magnitude greater number of developers in the III) group and maybe
even higher, but I have no feel for this.

I base these estimations on the following purely qualitative measures:

* number of recruiters calling me (I fall in the V. group) and them
consistently repeating the dearth of xquery talent

* number of people interacting with technologies I am involved with
e.g. eXist XML Database and most of the projects I am involved with
have some xquery component

* xml technology conferences which number in the low hundreds, rather
then thousands, of which xquery is a topic which is a subset

It is clear to me that XQuery is experiencing higher adoption rates
and getting used more (exp in context of XML databases).

hth, Jim  Fuller