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
It could also reflect the complexity of the environment. A lot of stuff can be done in waaaaaaaaaaay less lines of code in Pharo than in C for instance. Hence, we need less developers in Pharo/Smalltalk to do more stuff!  ----------------- Benoît St-Jean Yahoo! Messenger: bstjean Twitter: @BenLeChialeux Pinterest: benoitstjean Instagram: Chef_Benito IRC: lamneth Blogue: endormitoire.wordpress.com "A standpoint is an intellectual horizon of radius zero". (A. Einstein) From: Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> To: Pharo Development List <pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org> Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2016 10:29 AM Subject: [Pharo-dev] comparison statistics 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
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
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-ofte... 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
Well no complains from me, I think Pharo is doing great. Hope I can find a nice way to use it with a C++ executable, so I can use it in my games. On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 7:01 AM Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> wrote:
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-ofte...
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
participants (3)
-
Ben Coman -
Benoit St-Jean -
Dimitris Chloupis