The unofficial International Programmers’ Day is celebrated on the 256th day of the year, on September 12th during leap years or September 13th during common years – a special date, not just a random one. The number 256 was chosen because is the number of distinct values that can be represented with an 8-bit byte, a value that programmers know well. In addition, 256 is also the highest power of two (28) that is less than 365 (366), the number of days in a year.

The day is unofficially celebrated by many IT companies and programmers across the globe, yet it is officially recognized only in Russia. Programmers’ Day was proposed by Valentin Balt and Michael Cherviakov, employees of Parallel Technologies, a web design company. Since 2002, they had been trying to collect signatures in order for the Russian government to recognize this day as Programmers’ Day, which they finally achieved in 2009 when a legislative act proclaiming this day as the Programmers’ Day was signed.

The IT industry is truly flourishing and even the smallest companies will need programming services at some point, whether it’s for creating web sites or a complex database. Given the high demand, are there enough programmers in the world at the moment? The number of programmers in the world, the leading country according to the number of programmers, the layout of programmers in the world, and some other interesting facts from the world of programming:
According to statistics, there are approximately 18.5 million programmers in the world.
What is the layout of programmers in the world? According to research, the US has most programmers – around 3.6 million, which is 19.2% of all programmers in the world; China comes second with 1.9 million (10.1%); India is next with 1.8 million (9.8%).
This number is expected to reach 26.4 million by 2019.
Java programmers are in the lead with about 9 million, followed by around 5 million PHP programmers, and finally about 4.3 million Phyton programmers.
Ukraine is the country with the highest number of programmers in Central and Eastern Europe (about 50 thousand) and because of that, many foreign companies consider Ukraine to be the ideal country for software development outsourcing. According to the research of A.T. Kearney, Ukraine is among the top 50 countries in the world in terms of volume of the overall outsourcing activity.
If computer programming was a state, it would be the third according to the number of languages spoken in it. The first is Papua New Guinea with 836 languages, followed by Indonesia with more than 700, and finally Nigeria with over 500 languages. There are 698 programming languages know to men – both those that are no longer used and those that are still in use.
The first programming language was FORTRAN, created by an IBM employee John Backus back in 1954. It wasn’t commercially available until 1957.
The first programmer was a woman – British mathematician Ada Lovelace.
One of the fist women to get a PhD in computer science was Mary Kenneth Keller, a nun from Ohio, USA.
The first bug was named after an actual insect. Grace Murray Hopper discovered the first computer bug in history while working on the Harvard Mark II when she found a moth stuck in the computer that was causing the error.
The first computer game never generated income. In 1962, MIT programmer Steve Russell and his team spent 200 hours developing the first version of the game Spacewar. Even though the game was a big hit at the MIT campus, Russell and his team never made a profit from the game because the game was never copyrighted.
The first computer virus was designed without any malicious intent. In 1983, Fred Cohen, known as the inventor of computer virus defense techniques, designed a parasite application that could infect the computer, which later became known as the computer virus. The virus itself was “benign” and created only to prove that it was possible to create it.
Computer programming is currently one of the fastest growing professions.
If you are already fluent in a programming language, you can always come and have a word with us!