Re: [RFC] Git User's Survey 2008

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 23, 2008, 16:43 UTC
Message-ID: <7vwsjcft5g.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <200807231508.42334.jnareb@gmail.com>

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

Show 19 quoted lines

> On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>> On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:
>> 
>> Some people prefer to stay anonymous, so I think email is out.
>> 
>> >    04. Which programming languages you are proficient with?
>> >        (The choices include programming languages used by git)
>> >        (zero or more: multiple choice)
>> >      - C, shell, Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk
>> >      + (should we include other languages, like C++, Java, PHP,
>> >         Ruby,...?)
>> 
>> Yes, I think this should be a long list.
>
> I'd rather not have a "laundry list" of languages.  I have put C++
> because QGit uses it, Java because of egit/jgit, PHP for web
> interfaces, Ruby because of GitHub and because of Ruby comminity
> choosing Git.  I should perhaps add Emacs Lisp, HTML+CSS and
> JavaScript here.  What other languages should be considered?

I refrained saying this in my initial response, but my initial reaction was "Why are you even asking this?".

Yes, "getting to know you" demographics are customary done in surveys, and you kept it to the minimum which is also good, but I do not think this particular question is very interesting. For one thing, the question assumes the participant is a programmer, and we are giving an impression that we are interested in better programmers. Do we *still* require users to be a programmer to use git? I do not think so. Having to answer "none of these" to this question would make you feel unnecessarily bad, even if you are not a programmer and you know at the intellectual level that it is not your flaw not to be proficient in any.

Asking about geographic location and preferred human languages might help to gauge what l10n are desired for GUIs, but even there, don't forget that we are no company. We do not research markets and translate messages to missing languages, however popular, before being asked. That's not how we operate. So the result of these questions will be mainly to satisfy our curiosity, nothing more.

"What kind of content do you track" might also be an equally interesting question. It also falls into the curiosity department, though.

> I'm not sure about having multiple choice vs. free-form question here.
> Multiple choice is easier to analyze, especially if one would want
> histogram of replies...

And when you expect very many respondents, (1) you cannot afford to free-form; and (2) statistics over multiple choices, as long as choices are well seeded, will give you a good enough overview picture.

> Again: free form has some hassles, but so does coming up with good
> choice of fixed answers in multiple choice question.

You need to do at least one or the other, and I do not think there is any way to avoid that. Without a good choices, histogram would become useless (not necessarily because the answer will be dominated by "Other", but the seeing the choices tends to set the frame of mind when/before somebody answers the question). With free-form, you will spend the rest of your life analyzing to get any useful insight.