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