Pharo success in in the website, twitter and youtube channel.
Popularity wise the clear indication is community, I joined Pharo back in 2011 when it was already 3 years old and we had only one active mailing list , pharo-dev, pharo-users were practically unused. Then we got so�� many new people we had to move to pharo-users and keep pharo-dev only for the code going inside pharo standard distribution , then we grown even more and we started using Slack. Then I had the idea to move us to Discord, our Discord server ended up having way more channels than Slack. So we are definetly growing , how much is the real hard thing to determine.
Even if you take Github to account you will have to ignore all forks, because many Github users, including me, tend to use forks as mere bookmarks. So one's forks the project and ends never using it but the fork will also report commits that coming from the original repo. Coding like anything else in live is too complex to describe in numbers and stats.
I think the best way to sell any language is to do your research, the person or people who you want to convince, you have to know what they are interested about, web dev, databases, embeded computing etc. Instead of stats provided them with libraries and documentation. Anyone come making a super cool project but usually for a developers it far important to know that the "cool" language someone else is praising actually has the libraries you may need.��
I for example don't care at all for web dev, I don't even like it, or databases, but I love graphics and sound. So I won't care for Seaside, PharoJS etc. But Pharo Sound and Woden is two projects that are very interesting to me. Like a recent video publiced by Pharo in youtube about people using Woden (a 3d graphics engines made in Pharo) to do VR. If I never used Pharo before that definetly would tempt it, taking into account that VR is not even that widely available even with most popular languages.
Take for example Ruby, none really cared that no company made an amazing project in the language, what they cared was that a solo dev decided to make that amazing web dev library called Ruby On Rails and then , BOOM, Ruby exploded in popularity. Python's also popularity is purely on its library set solely, third party. Java is not the rule , it actually the exemption , merely for the practical fact that very few language can afford support from big companies. Python's creator did not even intend to make a programming language, its just made it to automate command line tasks because he was not so much into the Bash alternatives. He tried to even stop them from using it as C++ alternative, too late, Python is the standard in the scientific community. Basic started as just a language to teach kids and then it took over the world via home computers. People making pro apps in Basic, ridiculous, hello Visual Basic. Smalltalk started mainly as research project. Lisp as a purely theoretical mathematical concept.
So my advice is not to worry much about it, just find the libraries that people need in Pharo and that will be far more than enough to convince them to take the plunge. Available project in any language are nothing more than a tiny fraction of the language's potential, the big hot potatoes are performance (none likes slow code), libraries (everyone is lazy) and documentation (none likes to decipher other's people code).
People don't hide the fact that they use Pharo , afterall that's the whole idea of this mailing list to share your success and failures with Pharo and ask questions about it.
But you don't mean much to sell a language , afterall one thing all language popularity websites agree on is that almost 50% of the code out there is written for tiny project in languages none cares about. I am talking about languages like Pharo that end up having a popularity way bellow 0.01% . There is a reason we have thousands of languages to choose from and it ain't popular projects ;)