According to a report by research firm International
Data (IDC), the region with the highest amount of developers in the
world will soon be changing.
While North America claimed this top spot in 2001, IDC has
predicted that by 2005, Asia-Pacific will be the region with the
most people employed in the field. Over the next five years, the
growth in this region - particularly in China and India - is
expected to be much greater than in North America.
IDC said this change can be attributed partly to the economic
difficulties that have affected the number of employed developers
in North America, specifically from 2000 to 2001 when layoffs were
abundant.
Overall, IDC figures showed the number of professional
developers worldwide would actually increase to 13.3 million by
2006. In 2001, that number stood at 7.8 million.
The 10 countries in the world with the most developers include
the US, China, India, Russia, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, the
United Kingdom and Italy, representing approximately 62% of
developers worldwide.
The firm identified C/C++ and C# as the dominating language with
29% of the total in North America, with Java surpassed Visual basic
for the second most popular individual language.
IDC added that it also found a lot of developers were still
using older languages - such as 3GL, scripting and 4GL - as their
primary languages.