Re: [Pharo-users] Some facts and figures about pharo gaining momentum?

[Esteban Lorenzano]

Hi,

One think that is not measurable but is certainly there is the fact that we 
cannot keep a track of people using Pharo. We are always amazed about people we 
never seen before suddenly appears asking for help on something (which is sad, 
because we have more notice of people who has problems than the amount of 
people who succeeds and does not participates). 

Been part of a community is not the first impulse of programmers. I know for 
example in Argentina there are many more users of Pharo than those who pumps 
into the list time to time, but lack of open source culture (even if most 
people use just open source project) and also problems to master english (or at 
lease handle it enough to be understandable, as my self ;) ) makes people not 
to be very visible. 

That happens a lot in other places, and sadly we just know about them when they 
have problems… this is like out of topic, but still a way to measure: we as 
Pharo developers cannot track anymore how many users we have, and that’s a good 
thing.

Esteban

> On 5 Jul 2018, at 21:00, Andrei Stebakov  wrote:
> 
> 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  > 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 
> 
> 

Re: [Pharo-users] Some facts and figures about pharo gaining momentum?

[Andrei Stebakov]

Thanks, Dimitris for your take on the popularity of Pharo and languages in
general. I totally agree with most of it, especially when it comes to
choosing a language for your personal project or a small startup, you just
start with the library that has most of the features you are looking for
making sure that the performance is adequate for your needs.
When it comes to big corporations they are much less agile in switching
their technology and they consider it as a big investment with many other
factors to consider.
The size of the language community plays an important role since nobody
wants to invest in a language that may go extinct in a little while. Also
if the library of your interest has a low "bus factor' I.e the number of
contributors, it's a risky investment as the lib may get abandoned shorty.
One of the biggest factors which derives from the community size is the
number of developers on the market. Companies go with Java mostly because
of the abundance of devs on the market (of course the libraries play a very
important role here as well).
I think Pharo has made a good strategic move to use git as its major VCS,
hopefully all projects will move there and it will gain in popularity even
more because of that. I know some companies transitioned from VisualWorks
smalltalk to Java mainly because of unwieldy and archaic VCS that goes with
it (there were also concerns about the ability of Cincom to maintain the
language in the long term).
Also the ability of the language to be general purpose to cover many
domains like you mentioned plays a very important role since today the
company may only consider it as a platform to create desctop applications
but tomorrow when they switch to microservises they want to continue using
it for web development. The broader the range the better.

On Thu, Jul 5, 2018, 18:15 Dimitris Chloupis  wrote:

> 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 

Re: [Pharo-users] Some facts and figures about pharo gaining momentum?

[Dimitris Chloupis]

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 ;)

On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 10:01 PM Andrei Stebakov  wrote:

> 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 

Re: [Pharo-users] Some facts and figures about pharo gaining momentum?

[Andrei Stebakov]

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  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
>
>

Re: [Pharo-users] Some facts and figures about pharo gaining momentum?

[kilon.alios]

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