Thanks, Kilon for such an insightful answer. Lots of stuff to think about. I guess what I was waiting for is some success stories (which we already have on the website), but coming from you guys as consultants saying something like: "oh, this year I have more projects than last year" or "now my network of Smalltalk aware customers is that much bigger" or "a friend of mine who works in company XYZ says that after some consideration they started to use Pharo for micro services instead of Java". I know, it's hard to measure the success level in numbers (other than the example you gave with github stats), more like the word of mouth kind of thing. Another metrix could be the subscription rate for this mailing list, since chances are that most of new Pharo users would be on it and the acceleration of that rate would definitely say something about Pharo success. Wondering if we have access to that data. Thanks for your insight!
On Thu, Jul 5, 2018, 13:20 kilon.alios <kilon.al...@gmail.com> wrote: > You can check the github repos, github allows you to browse project repos > per > language. You could probably automate that from Pharo, use the Github API > like Iceberg does fetch the names of all projects using smalltalk language > and check to see which ones have commits the last year and then make a nice > graph using Roassal. You could do that also periodically to track the > growth > in popularity. > > Github is the center place for everything open source, Pharo and Squeak are > more tricky because they each have their own hosting sites squeaksource for > Squeak and smalltalkhub for Pharo but I think most modern Pharo projects > seem to have made the jump to github too. > > But even with Smalltalkhub there should be some API lurking in there > although I suspect it will be undocumented and a lot trickier to get it > working. > > Another source is Google trends, but I dont think google search is very > reliable because smalltalk is a regular word that is not 99.99% of the time > used to mean the programming language, so you will have to use terms like > "smalltalk programming" (this is the primary method that the TIOBE INDEX is > using for all its languages) but even that wont be very reliable. > > Technically speaking language popularity is a can of worms, there is a huge > disagreement even which are the TOP 10 most popular programming languages > right now. Even the TOP 3 can widely fluctuate. So as you can imagine > keeping track of something as unpopular as smalltalk is going to be quite a > challange. > > For example "everyone" seem to agree that there is very little reason > nowdays to use C over C++, cause "C++ is a much better C with objects" , on > the other hand language popularity websites seem to disagree with > "everyone" > because not only they have C in top 10 but in many cases its more popular > than C++ and to put more insult to the sin they also show it shrinking way > slower than C++ in popularity. Such an example is TIOBE > > https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ > https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/c/ > https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/cplusplus/ > > If we cannot even agree with C vs C++ imagine Smalltalk vs The REST. > > But I think Github API is a good place to start. The worst place to start > is > asking people for opinion and reading blog posts , hackernews, twitter, > facebook or whatever else "hipster" thing, especially stackoverflow and > medium. > > In the end language popularity is a hopeless cause. In theory everyone > cares, in practice, none does. > > > > -- > Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html > >
