[Haskell-community] 2018 state of Haskell survey

[Taylor Fausak]

Thanks for the feedback! 

- I would like to separate the survey into sections, but Airtable does not provide that functionality. I have sent a message to their support asking if I’m just missing it. Worst case scenario I can put some bogus questions in to act as dividers. I’ve put an example of such a divider question at the top of the survey. 

- The “Add an option” questions allow you to select multiple answers rather than choosing a single one. I’ve updated the questions to make that clearer by adding this help text: “Select all that apply."

- I’ve added a followup question to the one about GHC’s new release schedule: "Why do you feel the way that you do about the new GHC release schedule?” I’m open to better wording there. 

- I have added follow up questions of the form “What would you change about X?” where X is the language, compiler, build tool, or package repository. Hopefully that will provide meaningful guidance about how to improve those things without overwhelming the user with questions. 

- For information about using Haskell at work, I think that is covered by existing questions. Last year’s survey asked if people used Haskell at work, and this year’s added some followup questions to that. Company size is covered by the demographic questions at the end. The only missing piece is asking about the size of the team of Haskell programmers. Is that worth asking about separately? 

- I have removed “Official” from the title of the survey.

- I changed the Haskell Prime question to ask about importance rather than interest: “How important do you feel it would be to have a new version of the Haskell standard?” It uses the answer scale from here: https://help.surveymonkey.com/articles/en_US/kb/Likert-Scales <https://help.surveymonkey.com/articles/en_US/kb/Likert-Scales>

- I split academic and commercial conferences in the question about interacting with the Haskell community. 

- For the question about which type of Haskell software is developed at the respondents company, would it suffice to ask if the software is used internally by other employees and/or externally by customers? Another question already covers the type of software (web, CLI, GUI, …).

- I like the idea of drilling down into performance bottlenecks. How do you feel about phrasing it like this: “Which performance bottlenecks does your Haskell software typically hit?” With answer choices: CPU, RAM, disk, network, other, none.(I’m not sure what you mean by “bound by serialization.” Can you expand on that?) 

- I think the way that the software runs is covered by another question about the type of software (web, CLI, GUI, …). Is it worth it to have a separate question? 

I hope that addresses all the feedback so far. If not, please let me know! Thanks again! 

> On Oct 29, 2018, at 1:14 PM, Gershom B <gershomb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> HI Taylor.
> 
> A few thoughts. First, even with joint sponsorship, I don't think
> saying "Official" in the name of the survey is a good idea. Everything
> is "official" from whatever group supports it, but that seems besides
> the point. I think that the intended meaning here is a bit slippery
> since it can be interpreted as "approved by some body" but is often
> used to mean "authoritative" and as we've discussed, you can't really
> be authoritative with things like this, just "better".  Ok, that said,
> on to some other points:
> 
> "Are you interested in a new version of the Haskell standard?"
> 
> Interested is a very vague thing to ask. I'd want something more
> specific like "how important do you feel it would be to have a new
> version..."
> 
> On "Where do you interact with the Haskell community?" I think that we
> should distinguish between "conferences (academic)" and "conferences
> (commercial)" because ICFP and HaskellX, for example, are very
> different sorts of things.
> 
> I'd also like a question, as I mentioned earlier, like "What sort of
> Haskell software is developed at your company" with options for
> "in-house" "binaries deployed to customers" and "webapps used by
> customers" among maybe other options. Also perhaps "is the software
> you work on A) bound by memory B) bound by processor utilization C)
> bound by wire/disk speed D) bound by serialization E) not running
> against any performance limits at this time" and additionally is the
> software  intended A) for continuous (server) operation or B) batched
> operation or C) interactive user-driven operation.
> 
> Cheers,
> Gershom
> On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 4:06 PM Francesco Ariis <fa-ml at ariis.it> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello Taylor,
>> 
>> On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 02:42:16PM -0400, Taylor Fausak wrote:
>>> 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
>> 
>> Suggestions:
>> - state under which specific one of the "permissive license"s the
>>  results will be available;
>> - if it not mission critical, axe the last question.
>> 
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