[Haskell-community] 2018 state of Haskell survey results

Sun Nov 18 17:58:27 UTC 2018

If I could make a suggestion... although this is at the forefront of our
minds right now, I don't think that you want the attempted hack of survey
responses to be THE big news about the survey.  I have no doubt it will
garner lots of attention anyway, and you are certainly right to explain
what happened and what your methodology was; but I think it would be better
to state the legitimate results first... i.e., by saying "This year we
received 1,679 [*] responses, which is quite an improvement.", and waiting
until later to explain about the bogus submissions.  Hopefully, then, more
of the reaction will be around the data this provides, and less around ugly
drama with what seems like only ONE bad actor.

On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 10:58 AM Taylor Fausak <taylor at fausak.me> wrote:

> I have filtered out the bogus responses and re-generated all the charts
> and tables. You can see the updated results here:
> https://github.com/tfausak/tfausak.github.io/blob/ee29da5bd8389c19763ac2b4dbe27ff5204161f5/_posts/2018-11-16-2018-state-of-haskell-survey-results.markdown
>
> Note that until I post the results on my blog, they are not published.
> Please don't share the preliminary results on social media!
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2018, at 8:11 AM, Taylor Fausak wrote:
>
> Thanks for finding those anomalies, Gershom! I'm disappointed that someone
> submitted bogus responses, apparently to tip the scales of Cabal versus
> Stack. I intend to identify those responses and exclude them from the
> results. The work you've done so far will help a great deal in finding
> them.
>
> You said that there are about 1,200 responses with demographic
> information. That makes sense considering the number of submissions I got
> last year. Also, there are 1,185 responses that included an answer to at
> least one of the free-response questions. So perhaps whoever wrote the
> script didn't bother to put an answer for those types of questions.
>
> Unfortunately I do not have precise submission times or IP address
> information about submissions. Beyond what's in the CSV, the only other
> thing I have is (some) email addresses.
>
> Fortunately I wrote a script to output all the charts and tables from the
> survey responses. Once I've identified the problematic responses, I should
> be able to update the script to ignore them and regenerate all the output.
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2018, at 3:40 AM, Chris Smith wrote:
>
> Sadly, it looks like a Cabal/Stack thing.  Of the responses with a country
> provided, 618 of 1226 claim to use Cabal, and 948 of 1226 claim to use
> Stack. Of the responses with no country, only 35 of 3868 claim to use
> Cabal, while 3781 of the 3868 claim to use Stack.  Assuming independence,
> you'd expect that last number to be about 50, meaning there are probably
> around 3700 fake responses generated just to answer "Stack".
>
> To partially answer Simon's question, the flood of no-demographics
> responses started on November 2, around the 750-response point, and
> continued unabated through the close of the survey.  And, indeed, looking
> at just the first 750 responses gives similar distributions to what we get
> by ignoring the no-demographic responses.  For example, of the first 750
> responses, 359 claim to use Cabal, and 568 claim to use Stack.
>
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 2:31 AM Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Good spot Gershom. Maybe it would be revealing to look at the times that
> responses were received for the no-demographics group?
>
> On Sun, 18 Nov 2018, 07:17 Gershom B <gershomb at gmail.com wrote:
>
> I also noticed a number of other bizarre statistical anomolies when
> looking at the full results. I know this is a bit much to ask — but if you
> could rerun the statistics filtering out people that did not give
> demographic information (i.e. country of origin or education, etc) I think
> the results will change drastically. By all statistical logic, this should
> _not_ be the case, and points to a serious problem.
>
> In particular, this drops the results by a huge amount — only 1,200 or so
> remain. However, the remaining results tend to make a lot more sense. For
> example — of the “no demographics” group, there are 713 users who claim to
> develop with notepad++ but all of these say they develop on mac and linux,
> and none on windows — which is impossible, as notepad++ is a windows
> program. Further if you drop the “no demographics” group, then you find
> that almost everyone uses at least ghc 8.0.2, while in the “no
> demographics” group,  a stunning number of people claim to be on 7.8.3.
> Even more bizarrely, people claim to be using the 7.8 series while only
> having used Haskell for less than one year. And people claim to have used
> haskell for “one week to one month” and also to be advanced and expert
> users!
>
> The differences continue and defy all probability. Of the “no
> demographics” group, almost everyone dislikes the new release schedule. Of
> the “demographics” group there are answers that like it, were not aware of
> it, or are indifferent, but almost nobody dislikes it. There is naturally a
> difference in proportions of cabal/stack and hackage/stackage responses as
> well.
>
> There are a lot of other things I could point to as well. But, bluntly
> put, I think that some disaffected party or parties wrote a crude script
> and submitted over 3,000 fake responses. Luckily for us, they were not very
> smart, and made some obvious errors, so in this case we can weed out the
> bad responses (although, sadly, losing at least a few real ones as well).
>
> However, assuming  this party isn’t entirely stupid, it doesn’t bode well
> for future surveys as they may get at least slightly less dumb in the
> future if they decide to keep it up :-/
>
> —Gershom
>
>
>
> On November 18, 2018 at 1:10:31 AM, Gershom B (gershomb at gmail.com) wrote:
>
>
>
> This is interesting, but I’m thoroughly confused. Over 2500 people said
> they took last year’s survey, but it only had roughly 1,300 respondants?
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2018 at 9:56 PM Taylor Fausak <taylor at fausak.me> wrote:
>
> Hello! It took a little longer than I expected, but I am nearly ready to
> announce the 2018 state of Haskell survey results. Some community members
> have expressed interest in seeing the announcement post before it's
> published. If you are one of those people, you can see the results here:
> https://github.com/tfausak/tfausak.github.io/blob/7e4937e284a3068add9e9af6b585c8d0215ff360/_posts/2018-11-16-2018-state-of-haskell-survey-results.markdown
>
> If you would like to suggest changes to the announcement post, please
> respond to this email, send me an email directly, or reply to this pull
> request on GitHub: https://github.com/tfausak/tfausak.github.io/pull/148
>
> I plan on publishing the results tomorrow. Once the results are published,
> the post is by no means set in stone. I will happily accept suggestions
> from anyone at any time.
>
> Thank you!
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