Of course the saying goes "There are three types of lies: lies, damn
lies and statistics"
But assuming some estimate with no data is equally fallible.
Yes the committers list is obviously just "main developers" but
equally as I consider the
names on the Pharo About page, these are not drive-by one-bug-fix
contributors.

One significant difference between contributing to Pharo and
contributing to Python
is the additional barrier of entry to *stop* developing you
application and "invest the time
to learn the tool chain(s)(make, ReST, regrtest, svnmerge/svndiff,
sphinx, etc)" [1].

Python users are more likely to workaround an issue [2].�� Whereas in
Pharo, the system comes
ready to debug by default.�� Your workaround with Pharo is as likely to
change something in
core system code as change something in your app code.

[1] http://jessenoller.com/2010/04/22/why-arent-you-contributing-to-python
[2] https://tech.blog.aknin.name/2010/04/23/why-dont-i-contribute-to-python-often/

cheers -ben

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:26 AM, Dimitris Chloupis
<kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote:
> Allow me to be very skeptical, are you sure your numbers is not main
> contributors because I find it hard to believe that Python that has around 2
> million coders world wide
>
> https://blog.pythonanywhere.com/67/
>
> has ONLY 92 total contributors ? I would assume an estimate of around 1000
> including those that have just one simple bug fix.
>
> On Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 5:31 PM Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> wrote:
>>
>> Just bumped into some interesting statistics to consider when the
>> minor worry occasionally arises that Pharo is not more popular.
>>
>> One aspect to measure the liveness and success of a project is the
>> number of developers contributing to it.�� From the attached png, here
>> are the number of developers for some very popular projects...
>> 57 Apache
>> 40 Ant
>> 92 Python
>> 25 Perl
>> 29 PostgrSQL
>>
>> and from the list of contributors at http://pharo.org/about
>> 91 Pharo
>>
>> Now some care is the comparison since the first group are from 2006
>> and Pharo is 2016, and maybe the Pharo is an all-of-time list of
>> contributors.
>>
>> But Python's 2016 committers list has 138 names
>> https://hg.python.org/committers.txt
>>
>> and Github shows all-of-time list of contributors of 100
>> https://github.com/python/cpython/graphs/contributors
>> where you can see from individual graphs that many have not committed
>> for years..
>>
>>
>> So with caution I think we can take away that while Pharo does not
>> *yet* have the hordes of followers some other languages have, the
>> Pharo project is doing a reasonable job of attracting the interest of
>> contributing developers, which is a key indicator for future success.
>>
>> cheers -ben