On Wednesday, 28 February 2018 at 13:41:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
About a month ago, Sebastian Wilzbach sent an email out to a
few of the core D folks asking for feedback on a survey he had
put together. He thought it would be useful for the Foundation
to use in order to make decisions about where to expend
development efforts. Eventually Andrei gave his stamp of
approval, the survey questions were tweaked, and then it was
ready to roll.
Of course I would love for you to read my blog post announcing
it, but if you want to skip the prose and go straight to the
good stuff, here's the survey link:
https://seb134.typeform.com/to/H1GTak
The blog:
https://dlang.org/blog/2018/02/28/the-state-of-d-2018-survey/
Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/80w29n/the_state_of_d_2018_survey/
If that were to be done again here are a few points that I'd
improve:
- there are many occurences of open questions where I entered a
text only to find that the next fixed-choice question was about
what I had written. I therefore feel like open questions should
be asked as late as possible.
- some questions introduce clear bias as they don't have a clear
default exit path.
For example for "How would you rate the importance of having
documentation and error messages translated into your native
language?" I feel like english speakers should have a way to exit
cleanly as clearly they are both more numerous than the counter
part (I think) and less likely to feel a need for supporting
other languages.
Similarly for the question "Would you or your company donate to
the D Language Foundation (DLF)?" I feel like a "Maybe, I just
don't feel like it right now" tag would have allowed
distinguishing between people that actually don't have the money
but would donate otherwise and people that aren't opposed to the
idea but prefer donating to other projects for example.
- I don't know if typeform allows it but sometimes having a link
to the feature discussion or library reference would have been
great. I didn't had to search many of them to actually know what
the survey was talking about (which doesn't always indicate that
I'm not concerned about the consequences of the change).
That said, it was a very complete survey, thanks to everybody
involved in putting this up! I hope it'll be of some use to the
foundation.
