wow, they got 34 sites on the network! although most got only 200-3k questions - with new sites on major topics like: "Cooking", "Game Development", "Photography", "Mathematics" .. and a great Q&A system, they can really dominate the web.
Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques
#22Still a noob programmer, but I'm a huge fan of SO. I've yet to find a thread with any real bickering or pretentiousness, and 9 out of 10 times find an answer.
It seems like they dominate search results also, which is why I'm surprised that Quora, which I've never heard of, seems to get more respect?
Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just for reference there are roughly in the region of 15-30 million professional developers in the world. However this doesn't include a fairly large chunk of people (i.e students) who are probably the group most likely to be using StackOverflow. So I think Joel might be pushing it a bit to say most software developers are using it (although they have a fairly respectable chunk of the market).
Where did you get the 15-30 million number? We believe the number is closer to 9 million. For the United States, there are 1,336,300 programmers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The United Kingdom has 333,000 "software professionals," according to the Office for National Statistics. In Canada there are 387,000 people working in IT according to Statistics Canada. I haven't dug down to other countries but…
FYI, the world's population is about 22x the population of the US, so 15M doesn't seem crazy. That tool sales are lower in China does not necessarily mean that there are fewer programmers.
Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just for reference there are roughly in the region of 15-30 million professional developers in the world. However this doesn't include a fairly large chunk of people (i.e students) who are probably the group most likely to be using StackOverflow. So I think Joel might be pushing it a bit to say most software developers are using it (although they have a fairly respectable chunk of the market).
Where did you get the 15-30 million number? We believe the number is closer to 9 million. For the United States, there are 1,336,300 programmers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The United Kingdom has 333,000 "software professionals," according to the Office for National Statistics. In Canada there are 387,000 people working in IT according to Statistics Canada. I haven't dug down to other countries but…
Also those who are registered as software professionals with the British Computer Society or similar are least likely to be using SO - either because they know all the answers - or more likely - are too busy doing flow charts of what their perfect system would look like if they ever actually did any programming.
Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques
#25Still a noob programmer, but I'm a huge fan of SO. I've yet to find a thread with any real bickering or pretentiousness, and 9 out of 10 times find an answer. It seems like they dominate search results also, which is why I'm surprised that Quora, which I've never heard of, seems to get more respect?
Quora has a much smaller community mostly composed of people interested in start-ups in the Silicon Valley. They get coverage on sites like TechCrunch and HN because of that and the founders left Facebook (most likely because Zuckerberg replaced one of them as CTO with Brett Taylor).
I talked to them and they believe they can beat the competition simply by piggybacking off Facebook's social system and by using AI filtering to prevent people from being overloaded since they allow every topic unlike Stackoverflow.
Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just for reference there are roughly in the region of 15-30 million professional developers in the world. However this doesn't include a fairly large chunk of people (i.e students) who are probably the group most likely to be using StackOverflow. So I think Joel might be pushing it a bit to say most software developers are using it (although they have a fairly respectable chunk of the market).
Where did you get the 15-30 million number? We believe the number is closer to 9 million. For the United States, there are 1,336,300 programmers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The United Kingdom has 333,000 "software professionals," according to the Office for National Statistics. In Canada there are 387,000 people working in IT according to Statistics Canada. I haven't dug down to other countries but…
> Most development tool vendors report that about 40% of their sales are in the US.
I'm a programmer (living in Peru) and I have never spent a dime on development tools. I use emacs, kubuntu and friends. I also wrote (with friends) the site http://shapado.com which is an open source version of stackoverflow by the way :)
Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques
#27Stack overflow has probably been the best Q&A site around, content-wise, user-experience wise and probably every other criteria a user would care about. Good work !
Agreed. I've found it especially valuable as a bit of a teaching tool lately. I spent three years in a mind-numbing COBOL-based job, and now I'm building a PHP application to try to showcase the fact that I am more than the sum of my career, and to try to find a decent job. Since I'm doing this in isolation, I'm trying to use StackOverflow as a surrogate mentor. When I have a question about how to do things, mostly d…
About the only drawback is that it's now so popular that new questions only show up on the front page for a few minutes. So finding questions to answer - or getting your question answered is becoming harder - unless you are prepared to do a very narrow subject specific search.
One of the nice things about the early SO was it was so broad, you could see interesting questions that weren't directly in your language and read those as well.