[Haskell-community] 2018 state of Haskell survey

Mon Oct 29 09:55:58 UTC 2018

Thanks Taylor

Minor suggestions

  *   Provide section headings.  “How you use Haskell”, “What platforms you use” etc.  I think that’ll help navigation esp if they don’t answer all questions.  A single long list is exhausting.

  *   Some questions show “Add an option”, whereas others have a drop-down box.  Why?  Perhaps the former you can tick as many as you like?  That was very unclear to me.

  *   “How do you feel about the new GHC release schedule?”: can we provide an English language box too, rather than four canned responses.  Eg if they say “I like it” or “I dislike it” I’d love to know WHY they hold that opinion

  *   Similarly “I am satisfied about X” questions.  If dissatisfied I’d love to know
     *   why
     *   what could be better (about the compiler, cabal, stack, libraries resp)
Dissatisfaction alone is not actionable.

  *   For those that use Haskell at work I’d be interested to know the size of the team of Haskell programmers; and ideally the company.   For the latter I’m thinking of being able to say “the number of companies using Haskell is increasing” over time, rather than publicly listing their names.  Maybe it’s not worth it.
Simon

From: Haskell-community <haskell-community-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Taylor Fausak
Sent: 28 October 2018 18:42
To: Jasper Van der Jeugt <m at jaspervdj.be>
Cc: bgamari at gmail.com; haskell-community at haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-community] 2018 state of Haskell survey

We're creeping closer to the release date. I spent some time this weekend tweaking the survey in response to suggestions from this thread and also from GitHub. I don't plan on making any large changes to the survey between now and Thursday, except in response to feedback. Please take a look at the survey to make sure that you're happy with it! Let me know if there are any questions that you would like to be added, removed, or changed. You can view the survey here: https://airtable.com/shr8G4RBPD9T6tnDf

You can deliver feedback to me either in this thread or on GitHub: https://github.com/haskellweekly/haskellweekly.github.io/issues/206

On Fri, Oct 26, 2018, at 8:57 AM, Taylor Fausak wrote:
🎉 Hooray! That’s wonderful news! Thank you, Haskell.org<http://Haskell.org> committee, for supporting the survey.

I plan on releasing this year’s results in the same fashion as last year.

On Oct 26, 2018, at 5:31 AM, Jasper Van der Jeugt <m at jaspervdj.be<mailto:m at jaspervdj.be>> wrote:

Hi Taylor,

Yes, we're happy to support it from Haskell.org<http://Haskell.org>.

One additional ask from our side would be that the raw results are
published as well, but I saw in the issue you're already planning on
doing that.

Cheers
Jasper

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 11:18:30AM -0400, Taylor Fausak wrote:
We’re one week out from the release of the survey. I plan on spending this weekend putting the finishing touches on it. Can I plan on announcing it as the official state of Haskell 2018 survey, supported by both Haskell Weekly and Haskell.org<http://Haskell.org> <http://haskell.org/>?

On Oct 17, 2018, at 7:00 PM, Jasper Van der Jeugt <m at jaspervdj.be<mailto:m at jaspervdj.be>> wrote:

Hi Taylor,

Just a small comment: I would like to keep the survey open a bit longer -- I would suggest two weeks.  This gives us a bit more time to push it out twice to as many channels as possible (once at the start and a reminder after a week or so).  My intuition is that we'll be able to gather significantly more responses that way.

Thanks again for organizing this!

Cheers
Jasper

On Thu, 18 Oct 2018 at 00:55, Taylor Fausak <taylor at fausak.me<mailto:taylor at fausak.me> <mailto:taylor at fausak.me>> wrote:
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<http://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<mailto:m at tweag.io> <mailto: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<mailto:haskell-community at haskell.org> <mailto: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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Jasper

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