comparison statistics

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
<[hidden email]> 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 <[hidden email]> 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