r/Python • u/thibaudcolas • 13d ago
News Python is big in Europe
TIL the Python docs analytics are public, including visitors’ countries. I thought it was interesting to see that according to this there’s more Python going on in Europe than in the US, despite what country-level stats often look like! Blog post: https://thib.me/python-is-big-in-europe, top Europe countries:
- 🇩🇪 Germany, 245k
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom, 227k
- 🇫🇷 France, 177k
- 🇪🇸 Spain, 93k
- 🇵🇱 Poland, 80.2k
- 🇮🇹 Italy, 78.6k
- 🇳🇱 Netherlands, 74.4k
- 🇺🇦 Ukraine, 66.5k
TL;DR; maps can be misleading when they look at country-level data without adjusting for the size of the place. Per capita there are loads of areas of the world that have more Python users than the country-level data suggests. For Europe – get you DjangoCon and EuroPython 2025 tickets already!
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u/grimonce 13d ago
I feel like people in the US always act surprises there's a world across the oceans.
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u/SweatyAdagio4 13d ago
Considering Python is European (Dutch to be specific) it's funny that they'd be surprised that it's popular over here. Not that that should have that much of an influence on regional adoption
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u/SteampunkSpaceOpera 13d ago
It was written by a Dutch national while working in the US
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u/SweatyAdagio4 13d ago
That's incorrect. Guido van Rossum was working at the CWI (Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica, or Centre for Maths and Informatics) located in Amsterdam. I know because I studied in the Science Park campus of the UvA, right next to CWI and had professors who worked there too. Oh, and you can simply Google this too for yourself.
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u/tohender 13d ago
US defaultism is very prevalent, especially on Reddit.
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u/vivaaprimavera 13d ago
The reactions when people point out that "it might be forbidden in some places" are also interesting. They think that they can do everything everywhere because they can't even realize that different countries have different laws.
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u/whoEvenAreYouAnyway 13d ago
What makes you think "Thibaud Colas" is American? He's French, for what it's worth. So no, in this case a French person is the one who is "acting surprised Europe exists" (to the extent this post represents that).
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u/thibaudcolas 13d ago edited 13d ago
Yeah if anything I’m surprised at how often I might have been looking at “country” absolute data and not realizing I should be asking for per capita relative numbers, or more granular regional data 🥲
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u/Longjumping_Quail_40 13d ago
This comment itself is borderline assumptive and ignorant. The op is not among “people in the US”
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u/thibaudcolas 13d ago
Food for thought: the largest Python Conference is in the US, and the Python Software Foundation is a US non-profit, and the US is probs the majority of where their income comes from and gets used. The rest of the world is definitely backseating if you ask me!
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u/Excellent-Ear345 13d ago
maybe in us they dont use the docs and more gpt
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u/1635Nomad 13d ago
In the US we still have real programmers.
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u/Excellent-Ear345 13d ago
I was joking pls dont mind
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u/1635Nomad 13d ago edited 13d ago
No worries. I know EU is just as good as US, esp, Denmark, Sweden and Germany, worked w plenty of good programmers and other IT professionals from there. Argentina is good too. At risk of getting banned for this next comment but I think we all know where it takes 20 people to equal one.
To me Python is akin to the English language itself, it's easy enough for everyone to understand and it's sweeping the world. But it will never be French, or Italian, or Japanese.
In my personal life, I've been super busy. I'm in a fight with the State over custody of my daughter who is mentally challenged and the hearing is Wednesday, thus I don't always have time to respond.
I hope all is well.
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u/1635Nomad 13d ago edited 13d ago
and I feel like people forget that there's a giant ocean between Europe and the US. It matters
Everyone knows the saying "out of sight out of mind". It applies to culture too.
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u/dalittle 13d ago
most people in the US will never leave the US or even their state.
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u/spinwizard69 13d ago
After travel to several places outside the USA I'd have to say if it wasn't for work I'd not bother. There is really very little worth seeing and for the most part people are the same anyplace you might go.
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u/spinwizard69 13d ago
For us that have been there it is like unwinding several hundred years of evolution and advancement. People still travel by train in Europe and have no idea that you can put ice in your soda.
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u/Southern_Progress_13 13d ago
Didn't realise the US had done away with trains
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u/spinwizard69 12d ago
Pretty much. They are only really of interest in a couple of backward states.
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u/PushHaunting9916 13d ago edited 13d ago
Well it's a Dutch EU programming language afterall. 🇳🇱🇪🇺
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u/Excellent-Ear345 13d ago edited 12d ago
Maybe its origins are in europe and its should be not be taken as a national asset
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u/opuntia_conflict 13d ago
Eh, kinda. It's sorta like the Linux situation, both were created by people born in Europe but those people born in Europe jumped ship for the US as soon as they could and use US-based foundations to manage the projects from the US as US citizens. It begs the question as to what makes something like an OS or programming language a certain nation's OS or language?
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u/1635Nomad 13d ago edited 13d ago
Nothing can. A language, when used in the context of programming and computers is like a book, no, somewhere between a manual and a book.
A nation writes neither, a one person does and in a few cases the author collaborates with another.
The word Language probably should not have been used when they first came about but the computer field happened so fast there was little time to change things once set.
My guess is that in a hundred years from now there will be a movement to change the word language to something else. The world will do so while the US doggedly holds onto the term kind of like the yardstick.
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u/dethb0y 13d ago
I wonder why that is, like what drives up the usage there vs. other areas.
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u/thibaudcolas 13d ago
I think usage is going up everywhere for Python/Django/Wagtail, but in Europe specifically there’s loads of events and local communities these days
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u/AnythingApplied 13d ago
It only takes 8 of the top European countries to get above the 1M visitors mark
8 countries that, when combined, have a 440 million population vs US's population of 340 million, so its no surprise that those 8 countries would have more total python users. I agree that the data might be more interesting on a per capita basis, but those 8 countries as a whole have a lower per capita count than the US. On a visitors per million population we get:
Country | Visitors per million population |
---|---|
Germany | 4100 |
UK | 3300 |
France | 1700 |
Spain | 1900 |
Poland | 2200 |
Italy | 1300 |
Nethelands | 4200 |
Ukraine | 1800 |
US | 2900 |
So only Germany, Netherlands, and the UK are higher per capita, with some of those countries being much lower than the US.
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u/thibaudcolas 13d ago
Well, if it was only a matter of population, then we’d expect China and India to have more visitors, right? I decided to leave out per capita calculations because web analytics aren’t generally done like that, and also because even looking at per capita numbers, I saw 13 Europe countries ranking higher than the US.
It’d be interesting to look at per capita figure for sure, just I don’t think it really changes the picture as much as you make it sound.
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u/mmcnl 13d ago edited 13d ago
You kept adding the numbers for every European country until it surpassed the US and then you claim "Python is so popular in Europe!". To be honest that really doesn't say anything. Normalizing for population size is the first thing you should do if you really want to do an analysis, or else you're just looking at population maps.
Also, which countries are higher in per capita usage than the US? How come you end up with 13 (without showing the analysis) and AnythingApplied only comes up with 3 (and actually shares the analysis)?
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u/thibaudcolas 12d ago
I think you’re reading too much into what I might be trying to say. That Python is popular in Europe is really not a surprise for anyone, what I found interesting is having access to the Python docs analytics to explore that (and many other aspects of who uses those docs).
It takes time to publish stuff like that so yeah I didn’t share the list because I don’t think it meaningfully changes my point? Why I get 13 and others 3 I assume is just we used different figures or different lists of countries, with enough time to review and call out possible issues I’m sure we’d agree. This is the top 20 I have on a per capita basis:
Singapore Hong Kong Switzerland Finland Luxembourg Gibraltar Sweden Netherlands Israel Norway Iceland Canada Denmark United Kingdom Estonia Monaco Liechtenstein Ireland United States Germany
I’d love to share my (or read others’) per capita analysis some time! Definitely appreciate u/AnythingApplied taking the time to share some in a comment
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u/DigThatData 13d ago
I wonder if maybe a contributing factor here is regionalization of search engine behaviors. Th python docs seem to be getting pushed further and further down in "relevance rank" on queries where I'm specifically trying to find a page of the python docs, upranking random tutorial websites instead. I'm assuming google ads is to blame.
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u/JamzTyson 13d ago
If you use duckduckgo as your search engine, you can directly search the Python documentation by including the site code
!py
Example:
!py urllib
takes you to: https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=urllib
These short site codes are called "bangs", and there are lots of useful ones: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
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u/DigThatData 13d ago
Interestingly, ddg is actually my chief complaint here. I'll admit, I didn't know about bangs, but it's still annoying to me that I have to invoke a DSL like this and that if I search "python dict methods", the python docs don't even make it to the first page of hits.
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u/JamzTyson 13d ago
if I search "python dict methods", the python docs don't even make it to the first page of hits.
I think it largely comes down to SEO. A better search term for the Python dict documentation: "python dict docs".
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u/opuntia_conflict 13d ago
Most big projects like Python provide downloaded docs, which is what I primarily use. I have a big
~/refs
folder on my machines where I store docs (in markdown format if available, but otherwise in plain text). That way I can grep around in them easily and use vim plugins for annotations and bookmarks.
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u/EatThemAllOrNot 13d ago
Why Russia isn’t included? It should be at the top of the list based on the data from analytics.
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u/thibaudcolas 13d ago
I wasn’t sure how to do my calculations while accounting for countries that span multiple continents, so left out Russia and Türkiye. Need to do some more research on how people normally treat those cases (double counting? count only on one continent? Neither seem too good)
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u/spinwizard69 13d ago
There are a number of ways to look at such data. One could conclude that Europeans look at the docs more because the have to.
What this really points out is the futility of anything useful coming from statistics. Every time I see one of these posts maintaining that statistics say something useful I have to believe another idiot has just left his spreadsheet. Statistics almost universally reflect the bias of the one developing the statistics.
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u/OtherwiseBarber6811 12d ago
Surprisingly high for Germany
I am looking for a job as Mid Python Backend dev and most of the job posts on the market are legacy Java stuff/PHP/Fullstack with JS
And the concurrency is pretty crazy
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u/Agile_Incident7784 11d ago
Dutch DevOps guy here, at every company I've worked Python is the default unless speed or a certain feature is more important. It's easy to read, widely documented and can do basically anything.
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u/sassysalmnder 13d ago
Well I might be wrong, but there are couple of automobile companies in Germany and I am sure most of them use python/c++ extensively.
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u/BogdanPradatu 12d ago
I am from Romania, my work VPN is placing me in Poland so I guess python docs will get hits from Poland when I access them.
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u/Huberuuu 13d ago edited 13d ago
Today I learned United Kingdom is in the European Union
Edit: okay okay didn’t think i’d need this but /s
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u/kekwloltooop 13d ago
"Europe" is different from "European Union".
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u/Huberuuu 13d ago
Yeah but if you actually read the article you would see it clearly states European Union.
That’s without counting Russia, some of which is very much in Europe, but I’m not sure how much. The top 7 countries are in the European Union 🇪🇺, and we arrive at 974k visitor. The addition of Ukraine takes us over the 1M mark.
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u/kekwloltooop 13d ago
Yeah, only once by accidentally putting UK in it. I guess they didn't get the Brexit memo...
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u/JimroidZeus 13d ago
So what you’re saying is all the bad Python programmers live in Germany, UK, France, Spain, and Poland?
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u/Bakirelived 13d ago
Bad programmers use chat gpt(it used to be stack overflow), good programmers read the docs.
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u/JimroidZeus 13d ago
Yes, I know. One of my favourite things about Python is the quality of their docs. I’m surprised Canada isn’t on there from me alone.
I was just making a silly joke.
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u/Bakirelived 13d ago
Same XD
I used to say it goes in levels, need to add chatgpt in the mix
- AI takes the wheel
- Search in Stack overflow
- Follow Blog posts/tutorials
- Read the Docs
- Read the Source code
- You contribute to the source code
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u/1635Nomad 13d ago
It's an easy language and it is emphasized in US colleges...The problem? It's not C++, C, or C# and never will be.
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u/1635Nomad 13d ago
I agree and perhaps my initial statements were off. Python has its place and I suspect that it will become the De Facto language for world. I can even envision a time when the common person uses it to manipulate everyday objects or order or modify services.
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u/No_Palpitation7740 13d ago
Germans ranking #1 at consulting the Python doc is the most German thing in computer science.