rhombus-prototype
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racket
Annual survey
Some language communities do an annual survey.
Two examples:
Of course all information sources need to be taken with a grain of salt. Surveys tell you about people who are willing and able to set aside (say) 15 minutes to take a survey.
Regardless, this would complement information from another self-selecting population -- folks who are willing and able to create/debate/advocate/shepherd github issues and RFC documents over hours/days/weeks/months.
(The latter group is important because there is a lot of volunteer work to be done; the people who do it should be recognized/appreciated. However it probably tends not to include as many people with full-time jobs and/or family-care obligations through the summer; people busy working on a startup company that uses Racket; and so on. Even if you didn't want to weight their input as highly (?), it's probably better to know about it than not know at all.)
Maybe this is OT and "too meta" and should be closed.
If instead it belongs on the racket-users mailing list, or belongs in the circular file, please don't hesitate to let me know.
I should point out I was considering running a yearly Racket survey as part of Racket News at the end of the year (unrelated to the Racket 2 effort) . I was going to bring it up around September time in racket-users. If anyone here is willing to help, contact me. Otherwise stay tuned.
I'd be happy to help.
I think most of the work would be to review some example surveys, and come up with a list of candidate questions.
(I might look at a mix of old and recent surveys. Racket has been around much longer than both Rust and Clojure, so some of their more-recent questions might be more relevant. OTOH Racket has a smaller community, so in other cases their early-years questions might be more relevant. That's just a hunch; I haven't read much of them, yet.)
Also I think it would be wise to post a draft and ask for comments:
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For instance, I've expressed an opinion on a couple open topics. I'd want to make sure I wasn't introducing bias into the selection and phrasing -- not actually do so, and definitely not have anyone feel that I were.
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More basically, are the questions clear? Using good international English? etc.
If it makes sense we could make a little repo just for the survey, so the issues and edit history are all super transparent.
Thanks for the suggestions Greg - I agree with what you say and have little to add at the moment. I have started a repo under the Racket News umbrella and invited you with R+W permissions. Let continue the discussion there and in due time announce it to the community.
Actually I've come to realize that I've been spending too much time since RacketCon thinking about the future of Racket. As a result, I am sorry but I am going to de-volunteer to help with this.
@pmatos I opened an issue on that repo because I wasn't able to push until you create a default branch. I'm still wiling to push what I did so far this morning, or, just simply email you the file. Let me know whichever prefer, there.
Peace.
Suggested Goals:
- Find out about Racket users and developers
- Tell a story about Racket users and developers
Hi Brian @lojic
Paulo (@pmatos ) is leading on this and has created a repo for the task at https://gitlab.com/racket-news/racket-survey-2019
I've created a 'choose questions' and added your link to the julia survey to the ones we already had for rust and clojure
I've done a rough draft at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1R9YyChasFYEtubhbxkZurpeV1yz42ce7OwT5cvJ5RI8/edit?usp=sharing
This is mostly trying out the google forms platform that rust uses. Clojure uses SurveyMonkey which also seems good.
Do you want to get involved? I think Paulo wants to start working on it in september when everyone is back from holidays? (I'm away till the end of aug)
Stephen
In the meantime - this thread is a good place to suggest survey questions, identify appropriate survey software, or anything else you relevant.
The start of a list of questions (most of which would need rewording) about how people have their editors configured to view and edit code, and which features they use. Answers to some of these seem like they might correlate with how different folks perceive surface syntax.
- What editor do you use when working with Racket or #lang source code?
- Have you changed any of the editor's settings from default?
- Do you use syntax highlighting? [DrRacket -> Editing -> General Editing -> Color syntax interactively]
- Do you use an always visible rainbow-delimiters-mode or similar block level highlighting? [I don't think DrRacket has an easy way to enable this.]
- Do you use a sometimes on block-level highlighting? [DrRacket -> Colors -> Background -> Parenthesis color scheme -> Shades of *]
- Have you ever used your editor's auto-indent/auto-format feature to format code?
- How frequently do you use auto-indent? [some silly examples: "My editor is configured so that whenever I close a final delimiter it will auto-indent that block" or "I manually re-indent about as frequently as I manually save" or skipped because answered no]
- Do you use enable automatic parentheses, electric-pairs-mode or similar? [DrRacket -> Editing -> General Editing -> Enable automatic parentheses]
- Do you use paredit or similar?
Survey questions about editing racket code should also ask about the other, less controlled environments where code viewing and editing happens:
- Do you write racket code snippets in Markdown? How much?
- Do you edit racket files using GitHub's web editor? How often?
- Do you edit racket files hosted on remote computers, such as servers? How do you usually do this?
- Do you read racket code on mobile devices? How much?
