One of the best objective measurements I have found is the Debian and Ubuntu
package popularity contest results. This is an automated measurement of the
number of users who have packages (such as a specific compiler) installed.
However, it is obviously only an accurate reflection of usage on Linux and
not on Windows.
I have analysed these results by programming language before:
http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/most-popular-functional-languages-on....
Here are some recent results:
Debian Ubuntu Total
C#
mono-gmcs: 1,891 13,922 15,813
OCaml
ocaml-nox: 1,920 8,715 10,635
Erlang
erlang-base: 1,322 9,279 10,601
Haskell 9,794
ghc6: 1,214 5,392 6,606
hugs: 683 2,505 3,188
Haskell programmers will almost all have either hugs or ghc6 or both
installed, so there are between 6,606 and 9,794 of them.
You also mentioned the huge amount of talk about Haskell. You may wish to
distinguish between people who talk the talk and people who walk the walk.
I recently gathered statistics about this and found that open source
software written in OCaml is 30x more successful than Haskell in terms of
users garnered per programmer:
http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/haskells-virginity.html
Finally, I should note that Don Stewart posted a rebuttal to my findings on
the Haskell-Cafe mailing list and then had me banned before I could reply:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-August/046129.html
My answers are probably obvious but I shall repeat them here
anyway:
. By Don's metric of chat-room lurkers, Haskell is twice as popular as C#.
So that is clearly a broken metric.
. Unused libraries are worthless.
. Arch Linux only has a disproportionate number of Haskell packages because
Don Stewart generates them himself. They never get used. Indeed, Arch Linux
itself is virtually unused. Don demonstrated this nicely by packaging the
next 30 lines of code that were posted to the mailing list into yet another
unused Haskell library for Arch Linux:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-August/046170.html
. Although the Haskell list has several times as much traffic as the OCaml
list, both lists have ~100 active contributors according to Google Groups:
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.haskell/about
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/about
In essence, a tiny number of very vocal Haskell proponents try to make it
look as if Haskell has many real programmers and success stories but the
reality is quite the opposite.
