In the early 80's, reaching a million sold of home computers used mostly for games was a major milestone. The best selling home computer of all time by far - the C64 - "only" sold 20 million or so.
Most of the people using them never learned to do more than load and start games.
While we're probably building a generation where a smaller proportion of those who use computers extensively know details about them, it'd be pretty incredibly if the absolute numbers of people with development skills at the level of those of us who grew up with those home computers weren't significantly higher.
E.g. AIDE - an IDE for writing Android apps on Android devices, quite the special niche, shows up as 100k - 500k downloads on Google Play.
Ohloh reports projects with more than 10k participants and over half a million projects total, and 1.6 million total users (though that's likely over-reporting, as for unclaimed user names there might be substantial duplication).
I find it a pretty safe assumption that the number of programmers has never been higher - we just make up a smaller percentage of computer users.
In the early 80's, reaching a million sold of home computers used mostly for games was a major milestone. The best selling home computer of all time by far - the C64 - "only" sold 20 million or so.
Most of the people using them never learned to do more than load and start games.
While we're probably building a generation where a smaller proportion of those who use computers extensively know details about them, it'd be pretty incredibly if the absolute numbers of people with development skills at the level of those of us who grew up with those home computers weren't significantly higher.
E.g. AIDE - an IDE for writing Android apps on Android devices, quite the special niche, shows up as 100k - 500k downloads on Google Play.
Ohloh reports projects with more than 10k participants and over half a million projects total, and 1.6 million total users (though that's likely over-reporting, as for unclaimed user names there might be substantial duplication).
I find it a pretty safe assumption that the number of programmers has never been higher - we just make up a smaller percentage of computer users.