size of XQuery developer community

[Michael Kay]

> 
> Please help me with this. I honestly don't know the answer.
> 
> How do you appreciate the size of the XQuery developers community ?  
> (thousands,
> tens of thousands, millions !!??)
> 

Over the lifetime of my XSLT reference book (nearly ten years), I think it
has sold about 50,000 copies. If you assume one in 10 XSLT developers has
bought a copy, that's half a million developers. Of course they aren't all
writing XSLT all the time, some may have done one 4-week project and then
moved on. And some people have bought more than one edition. But that's
probably a better measure than downloads, because it's impossible to
estimate repeat figures for downloads. A more conservative estimate might be
100K active developers. If we were serious about it we might define "active
developers" as the number of people using XSLT in any one month.

I would tend to share Ken's view that the number of XQuery users is probably
about 20% of the XSLT figure. That's from a number of indicators:
availability of books, traffic on mailing lists, traffic on Twitter,
interest shown at conferences, etc. So that would give a figure of 20,000
active developers.
 
But it's very hard to tell. I don't even know how many developers there are
in my largest XQuery customer (an investment bank). I would hazard 100, but
I've no idea. These people are not typically very visible on the internet -
programmers working for a bank tend not to be very outward-facing, with a
few exceptions. And they develop their skills internally within the
organisation.

In the Google trends figures, I'm always struck how different the geographic
spread is from anything that IT market size gives you. The market for Saxon
is probably fairly similar to much other similar Western software: 40% North
America, 50% Europe, 10% rest of world (that's direct sales only). Google's
figures always show a much higher figure for Asian countries, and it would
be nice to have an explanation. (There are probably Asian software products
that we never get to hear about: the flow of information from West to East
is much better than in the reverse direction.) The high figures for Czech
Republic are also intriguing, given the size of the country. It would be
nice to have SourceForge download figures broken down by geography, but I
don't think they are published.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay