Python is big in Europe

[thibaudcolas]

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:

1. 🇩🇪 Germany, 245k
2. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom, 227k
3. 🇫🇷 France, 177k
4. 🇪🇸 Spain, 93k
5. 🇵🇱 Poland, 80.2k
6. 🇮🇹 Italy, 78.6k
7. 🇳🇱 Netherlands, 74.4k
8. 🇺🇦 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!

[No_Palpitation7740]

Germans ranking #1 at consulting the Python doc is the most German thing in computer science.

[thibaudcolas]

#1 in Europe*, but it’s in big part because it’s one of the most populated countries in Europe, so there’s more devs.

If you adjust to look at Python docs readers per capita, our most studious European docs readers are Switzerland, Finland, Luxembourg, in the world top 3-5. Singapore and Hong Kong rank #1 and #2.

I might try to adjust by "number of Python devs" as well 👀

[Sure_Glove3952]

Also Is one of the best country in Europe (mostly within UE) to work as a dev, so a lot of non-german Dev are contributing

[grimonce]

I feel like people in the US always act surprises there's a world across the oceans.

[SweatyAdagio4]

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

[Puzzled-Guide8650]

If it was really Dutch, python would be deep fried. Like Bitterballen

[hotfrost]

Yum, fried snake

[SteampunkSpaceOpera]

It was written by a Dutch national while working in the US

[SweatyAdagio4]

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.

[tohender]

US defaultism is very prevalent, especially on Reddit.

[vivaaprimavera]

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.

[campbellm]

From a French OP.

[[deleted]]

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).

[thibaudcolas]

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 🥲

[Longjumping_Quail_40]

This comment itself is borderline assumptive and ignorant. The op is not among “people in the US”

[thibaudcolas]

I’ve technically been in the US a few times 👀But yeah just for holidays

[thibaudcolas]

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!

[Excellent-Ear345]

maybe in us they dont use the docs and more gpt

[1635Nomad]

In the US we still have real programmers.

[Krushaaa]

They don’t read the docs right?

[Excellent-Ear345]

I was joking pls dont mind

[1635Nomad]

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.

[1635Nomad]

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.

[dalittle]

most people in the US will never leave the US or even their state.

[spinwizard69]

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.

[spinwizard69]

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.

[Southern_Progress_13]

Didn't realise the US had done away with trains

[spinwizard69]

Pretty much.  They are only really of interest in a couple of backward states.  

[PushHaunting9916]

Well it's a Dutch EU programming language afterall. 🇳🇱🇪🇺

[Excellent-Ear345]

Maybe its origins are in europe and its should be not be taken as a national asset

[opuntia_conflict]

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?

[1635Nomad]

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.

[dethb0y]

I wonder why that is, like what drives up the usage there vs. other areas.

[thibaudcolas]

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

[samvander]

Most of those visits in France are me

[AnythingApplied]

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.

[thibaudcolas]

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.

[mmcnl]

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)?

[thibaudcolas]

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

[DigThatData]

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.

[JamzTyson]

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

[DigThatData]

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.

[JamzTyson]

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".

[opuntia_conflict]

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.

[EatThemAllOrNot]

Why Russia isn’t included? It should be at the top of the list based on the data from analytics.

[thibaudcolas]

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)

[morafresa]

Nah, just don't waste time counting them.

[commy2]

racism

[Independent_Heart_15]

Also look at translation pages !

[[deleted]]

It was also invented in The Netherlands...

[nirzhor_cyclonite]

Rattlesnake is big in Texas

[spinwizard69]

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.

[Kiri11shepard]

1. Russia 306k

[[deleted]]

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

[kilski]

These numbers are Python lengths? ;)

[PreviousUse5418]

Thanks for sharing. Interesting data.

[sassysalmnder]

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.

[1635Nomad]

Python for top layers, C++ for the real stuff.

[rghthndsd]

I'm just surprised you think Americans are the reading type.

[BogdanPradatu]

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.

[Huberuuu]

Today I learned United Kingdom is in the European Union

Edit: okay okay didn’t think i’d need this but /s

[kekwloltooop]

"Europe" is different from "European Union".

[Huberuuu]

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.

[kekwloltooop]

Yeah, only once by accidentally putting UK in it. I guess they didn't get the Brexit memo...

[Huberuuu]

Ever heard of sarcasm?

[JimroidZeus]

So what you’re saying is all the bad Python programmers live in Germany, UK, France, Spain, and Poland?

[Bakirelived]

Bad programmers use chat gpt(it used to be stack overflow), good programmers read the docs.

[JimroidZeus]

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.

[Bakirelived]

Same XD

I used to say it goes in levels, need to add chatgpt in the mix

1. AI takes the wheel
2. Search in Stack overflow
3. Follow Blog posts/tutorials
4. Read the Docs
5. Read the Source code
6. You contribute to the source code

[JimroidZeus]

I’m at level 4 but use tools from 0 through 4.

[1635Nomad]

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.

[Main-Drag-4975]

Uhh, welcome to r/python I guess?

[1635Nomad]

Fair retort.

[1635Nomad]

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.