[Haskell-community] 2018 state of Haskell survey

[Taylor Fausak]

Thank you all for the wonderful feedback so far! I greatly appreciate all of it. 

I didn’t mean to be exclusionary with my language before, and I thank y’all for correcting me there. “We’re doing this together for the benefit of all” is an excellent way to say what I’m shooting for here. 

My goal for the survey is to be useful to many different groups of people: the GHC team, library authors, application developers, repository maintainers, prospective employees, hiring managers, community organizers, and no doubt many more groups that I’m not thinking of right now. I want to avoid results that are neat but not useful. I also want to avoid results that simply throw fuel onto common flame wars.

Last year I announced the survey results and provided some commentary. I suspect I’ll do something similar this year, although reading your comments here makes me want to do less analyzing in favor of simply publishing. I am not particularly adept at analyzing survey results and am bound to make some rookie mistakes. In fact, one of the reasons that I published the results last year was so that someone who actually knew what they were doing could slice and dice the data. 

As far as scheduling is concerned, I plan to keep the survey open for a week, from November 1st to 7th. Publishing the results should happen relatively quickly after that. I slowed myself down last year by rendering a bunch of graphs, and even so I published on November 15th. 

It sounds like the Haskell.org committee is broadly in favor of backing the upcoming Haskell Weekly survey. Is that correct? In either case, what are the next steps? 

> On Oct 16, 2018, at 5:10 PM, Boespflug, Mathieu <m at tweag.io> wrote:
> 
> Since I was pinged up-thread, might as well chime in. If only to say
> "I agree": selection bias is what it is. Taylor's efforts to come to
> this committee are laudable. And really could help mitigate some
> issues we've seen with other surveys. Selection bias isn't something
> worth agonizing over, provided we're careful to say in the analysis of
> the results: "We found that X% of the respondents of this survey use
> Y", not "X% of Haskell devs use Y".
> 
> On Tue, 16 Oct 2018 at 21:02, Simon Peyton Jones via Haskell-community
> <haskell-community at haskell.org> wrote:
>> 
>> | Hi Taylor. I like the way you pose things here: "I don't expect that
>> | to remove selection bias, but it will let me (us, really) say: We're
>> | doing this together for the benefit of all sides". I think that's a
>> | better place to start from.
>> 
>> I like this too -- and like Gershom, I'd delete "sides".  We aspire
>> to work together, not on different sides.
>> 
>> | earlier I've been thinking about a bit, where you wrote: "My goal is
>> | for this survey to be *the* authoritative Haskell survey and for the
>> | community to broadly accept it's results."
>> 
>> This sounds a bit too exclusive to me, and implicitly critical of other
>> work.  Better to stick to the positives: you simply want the
>> opinions of a broad constituency on a broad range of questions.
>> 
>> | Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of suggesting that it might be
>> | good if the purpose of the survey was explicitly set out as trying to
>> | inform developers of haskell libraries and tools (and educational
>> | materials) regarding the systems their potential users work on and
>> | develop, and their habits and practices in doing so, and where they
>> | encounter difficulty. That is explicitly as a way of learning rather
>> | than as any sort of horse-race or popularity contest.
>> 
>> That sounds good to me -- but again in drafting the goals I'd stick
>> to the positives, and not speak about horse-races.
>> 
>> Simon
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