Business awareness of Perl developers
Once I wrote a post about the business readiness of various programming languages by comparing the number of people in LinkedIn mentioning the name of the language. This cannot be done any more but now I found another interesting way to measure.
I checked the LinkedIn groups dedicated to specific languages and there I can see the number of members. It is far from being scientific but it is interesting.
Executive summary
.NET 37,586 Java 33,080 PHP 16,609 Python 9,538 Javascript 8,506 Ruby 8,412 Perl 3,891
Perl
The biggest group is the Perl Mongers group with 3,891 members that was setup by José Castro when he was doing the communication of The Perl Foundation.
There are also other groups I have not seen earlier such as the Perl group with 2,808 members and the Perl Jobs group with 760 members both owned by Dariusz Jackowski. There is also a group dedicated to The Perl Foundation with 102 members which is owned by Marco Lima.
There are many other, smaller groups mostly related to specific Perl Monger groups.
There are some other Perl related groups as well.
For example There are 3 Webgui related groups with 129, 53 and 11 members respectively.
The Bricolage group has 20 members. The Catalyst group has 70 members. The Padre group has 30 members.
Python
The Python Community has 9,538 members and the Django group has 3,492 members.
Ruby
Ruby on Rails has a group with 8,412 members. the Rubyists group has 2,744 members There is another RoR (Ruby on Rails) group with 1,643 members. What is very interesting to me is that there is also a group called Business on Rails with 1,460 members.
There are several more Ruby related groups.
PHP
LinkedPHPers with 16,609 members. There is a smaller group called Php developers with 7,324 members.
There are several groups for Drupal. The biggest is just called Drupal and it has 6,875 members.
Java
Java Developers is the biggest Java related group with 33,080 members.
.NET
.NET People has 37,586 members.
Javascript
The group called Javascipt has only 1,988 members but the JQuery group has 5,196 members and there is a group called Rich Internet Applications (RIA) uniting the various Javascript based frameworks with 8,506 members.
Conclusion
I am sure you can all draw your own conclusion.
Mine is that the Perl community is the least business aware among the languages I checked and maybe it is time to send out another call to all the Perl users to join the Perl Mongers group on LinkedIn.
I'll check these numbers a week from now again to see if there is any significant change.