Re: [Caml-list] Estimating the size of the ocaml community

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 04:31:28PM -0500, Yaron Minsky wrote:
> I've been trying to come up with some estimates on the size of the ocaml
> community, and I'm wondering if others have come up with anything better.
> Here's what I have so far:

I don't know if it is interesting for what you need, but the debian popularity
contest :

  http://popcon.debian.org/

shows ocaml starting at position 1858 :

  #rank name                            inst  vote   old recent no-files (maintainer)
  1858  ocaml-base-nox                   743   238   396   109     0 (Sven Luther)                   

But this may be biased by the split of ocaml between different packages,
ocaml-base-nox is the runtime without X related libraries. The most used
packages (adduser for the per inst sorting) is around 6000, so this would mean
that about 10% install ocaml stuff, since inst is : 

  #<inst> is the number of people who installed this package;

Naturally, the results are probably biased by the way popularity contest is
run. popularity contest (popcon) is a package which you can install but which
is not installed by default, and where you can opt-in into the mechanism,
which sends (weekly ?) emails about the installed packages to the debian
popularity-contest. Still, this means that at least 743 people have it
installed, that 238 "use this package regularly", and 109 have recently
upgraded it. No idea about how the "use this package regularly" numbers are
calculated though.

Hope this kind of info is helpful to your estimates ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther