| HN Mirror

Hi, I'm a Principal Market Research Consultant with SlashData. We've been around for more than 15 years, and we work with the largest organisations in tech when it comes our market research on developers (our client page include AWS, Google, Microsoft, LF, Cisco, and so on and so on). Not bragging, but trying to assuage concerns that we are some fly-by-night org that popped up out of nowhere.

The makers of the documentary reached out to us to use our footage in the report and Bjarne has also used our report/blog when talking about the future of C++. In general, our hypothesis about its continued relevance is in line with what the documentary itself reports: developer numbers have grown massively and C++ has a very specific series of use cases that maintain its relevance.

Our methodology page is lengthy, but it can be summarised by the combination of several pieces of distinct information. We have labour statistics from various national governments to provide reference points, we use statistics from areas developers associate with (e.g. StackOverflow or GitHub) and compare against responses from inside the survey, and our own build-up of numbers based on the proportional data from within the survey (region, age, area, development, etc.). We have been doing this for many years. We also acknowledge in our reports that we are confident in all regions, but with greater uncertainty in the Greater China region, as we are a non-Chinese firm, so we have to work with partners in the region which minimises our confidence in the region.

The report lists the numbers for the major leading languages, basically any language that is used in multiple areas of development and has more than 500k users, give or take. It is not a perfect measure approach but it is about giving the most useful information at the highest level. We also exclude things like SQL because they are nor programming languages, unlike most of the other measures.

For the report, we typically have blogs available with similar information, but our free reports are designed for lead generation, which is why emails are asked for.