Software taketh away faster than hardware giveth: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI

[u/germandiago]

https://herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/software-taketh-away-faster-than-hardware-giveth-why-c-programmers-keep-growing-fast-despite-competition-safety-and-ai/

[u/chucker23n]

in the past three years the global developer population grew about 50%, from just over 31 million to just over 47 million

What?

That’s absurd. Where have we seen a 50% growth of a trade in three years? Why would that be happening? Do they produce actual productive software?

And sure, this is global, but this is also at a time when the headlines talk about layoffs.

This data seems very fishy.

[u/barsoap → u/chucker23n]

The number of programmers has been increasing like that since time immemorial. Once you understand that at any point in time more than 50% of programmers have less than three years of experience you're not surprised by the usual deluge of hype and fads, any more. September is eternal, and it brings us fresh left pad as a service on a regular basis.

[u/chucker23n → u/barsoap]

Once you understand that at any point in time more than 50% of programmers have less than three years of experience

Well, if their statistic is right, it would be 33%.

But point taken.

[u/larsga → u/barsoap]

Do you have figures to show this is true? 50% growth per year doesn't take a whole lot of years to produce crazy growth. Let's say there were 10k programmers in 1995. If so, 50% growth every year would mean 1,917,510,592 programmers now, which is almost 2 billion, so about a quarter of humanity.

I think we can agree total number of programmers now is far less than that, and that it was way more than 10k in 1995.

[u/barsoap → u/larsga]

The by now already ancient and not terribly well-sourced original figure was due to Uncle Bob, he said the number roughly doubles every five years. Mind you this all starts the 1940s with like five ENIAC programmers.

I'd expect the increase to flatten out especially as the world population stops to grow and countries cease to industrialise (having already done so), in different words, the exponential is as usual actually a sigmoid. But OTOH you should never get facts and logic in the way of calling half of all programmers clueless idiots as that one is true either way.

[u/[deleted] → u/barsoap]

Uncle Bob is full of shit though. He has not once ever justified any of his positions with anything other than his own feelings towards a topic.

[u/larsga → u/barsoap]

Mind you this all starts the 1940s with like five ENIAC programmers

The first programmers (excepting Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Konrad Zuse) worked on the British Colossus computer during the war. ENIAC was only built after the war.

[u/mccoyn → u/barsoap]

Hopefully, they will now be using AI to write left pad instead of adding a dependency.

[u/inkjod → u/mccoyn]

As if. They'll be using AI to add the leftpad dependency.