I upvoted it because I have fond feelings and memories of Pharo. The warm fuzzies aside, even if someone hasn't used it, it's one of those places that remind us of the delight of programming and computation. Like, "Oh, yeah, I used to feel optimistic and happy about the Computer when I was programming in basic a thousand years ago."

As the author of this post, I have to say that I, too, was surprised by how well it's doing. But people at HN are generally very receptive to Lisp/Smalltalk posts, and lately, at least one Smalltalk-related post has appeared on the front page every week.

It's Pharo, which has a small but loving community.

Several of my friends love it.