Re: [RFC] Git User's Survey 2008

On Wed, 23 July 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

Some people prefer to stay anonymous, so I think email is out.

quoted

   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.

The idea, I think, was to gauge which parts of Git would be hard to
find developers for, because of small number of people proficient in
the programming language the part is written in.  I'm thinking here
about Tcl/Tk and gitk and git-gui, see
  http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2007#head-ecb5564d71e4093e2e93e508380407a26dbcbdea

Nevertheless, _if_ this question is to stay (I am not sure one way or
another), we would better add "I am not programmer" or something like
that to the list of possible answers.

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.

It would also answer question if adding support for i18n in git, for
example support for translating git commands messages, is something
which people would want or not.  If they would be translated or not
it would depend on people, but one cannot even begin translation
efforts if there is no infrastructure in place.

But as the rest of localization / internationalization / translation
questions ("What do you need translated?" for example) were removed
from proposed set of questions for this year survey, perhaps this
question should be removed as well.

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

True.

What should be the list of possible choices? Source code,
documentation, configuration, backup, binary files, other?

quoted

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.

I wonder how many responses will we get this year.  In 2006 there were
around 117 responses (but IIRC it was announced only on git mailing
list, wasn't it?), in 2007 survey there were 683 individual responses.
Git is even more popular now, I think...

OTOH there are some questions, like "feature requests/proposals"
question which *do require* free-form question.  But they should
be few, and preferably for questions for which we don't need
histogram of replies.

I'll convert as much questions as possible to multiple choice
(pre-seeded), trying to come up with a good set of canned responses.


A question: if analysis of responses was not a problem, do you prefer
free form, or "select a choice" question?

quoted

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.

True... well, depending of course on the number of replies.  Analysing
around 50 free-form replies (half of 100 individual responses to survey)
is not impossible; analysing 250+ is a lot of work.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland