The Perl Survey 2010 is ready for you to complete!
Finally after many delays, the Perl Survey 2010 is ready for participants to complete. It should take you about 10 to 15 minutes. The purpose of this survey is to find out information about programmers who use Perl, the tools that they use, and their opinions about Perl. The survey is funded by The Perl Foundation, with hosting support from Strategic Data and Shadowcat Systems. We plan to re-run the survey every two to three years to see how the community changes over time.
So please fill in a questionnaire yourself by visiting the Perl Survey website. Once you've done that, please tell your friends, tell your friends friends, and your friends friends friends. We don't just want heavily involved members of the Perl community to complete the survey but more casual Perl programmers as well. The 2007 survey managed about 4,000 responses, but I'd be happy with around the 1,000 mark.
I'll be presenting the initial cut of the data analysis in three weeks time (Week beginning June the 5th) at the German Perl Workshop.
Catalyst hacker, management researcher and health informatician.
I am happy that we finally have the survey running!
I believe if member of the Perl Community invest some energy in it and forward the request to fill out the survey to people who are inside companies and are not reading our blogs and mailing list then we can reach the 4,000 responses.
I hope the survey will run once a year and might be expanded to cover a few more questions. E.g. field of usage (web/system/bioperl etc.) size of the perl team people work in, size of the companies they work in and I am sure there are lots of other
questions that would like to get answered.
Does anyone have previous years' results? "http://perlsurvey.org/results/" is some domain squatter these days.
2007 results are available from github.
Some comments: Too bad the editors section doesn't have an "Other" option - now I cannot list my editor. I've also no idea what "open source dynamic languages" are. Is C "open source"? What's the source of a language anyway? The block about "Community Involvent" asks for contributions to CPAN modules, and the perl interpreter. That leaves any contributions to core modules, and whatever else comes with the core (documentation, tests) out of the loop. I'd bet there are more people who have contributed to the non-interpreter part of the core than just to the interpreter. Final nitpick: now that 5.12.1 is out, when asking for what Perl versions you are using, the last item ought to be marked "5.12.x", not "5.12".
Abigail:
Thanks, That's useful feedback for the next run in 2012 or so. I did pilot the survey with around 30 individuals before it went live, and there were some especially useful comments from that, but there will always be issues that come up.
However, it is possible to extrapolate these things in that contributions to core will be lower than those to CPAN but higher than those to the interpreter. We also get such a large sample from this survey that lots of interesting statistical work is possible.
Sorry about the lack of "Other" option in editors. The list came from an empirical study of the most used editors that Perl people use, so I expected it to be almost totally complete. However I may include that option next time (however it might encourage people not to use the multiselects).
Thanks for putting the survey up. A couple of comments that I hope will be taken in a good light:
1) I think the survey would come across as a significantly more credible if you added links to strategic data and made the onion a link. When I initially saw the survey page, STRATEGIC DATA in big bold letters made me cringe - I didn't know if this was a company like Lexis Nexis trying to gather data on Perl programmers, or an actual Perl Foundation sponsored effort. That this is a TPF sponsored effort needs to be really clear.
2) Can you get rid of the captcha?
3) Can you add some more language on how the data is kept and if it will be made available at some point? With the current facebook scandals, transparently is a key to success here I strongly believe.
4) Can you use a CNAME for survey.perlfoundation.org instead of the existing url? It is somewhat confusing that there is a link to survey.perlfoundation.org that doesn't actually go there.
These are small nitpicks, but I think they are important to get people to take their time filling out the captcha (I really hate those), and giving them the warm fuzzies that this is an endorsed TPF effort.
Phred.
Strategic Data offerend hosting at the last minute which meant that at a very busy time for me I suddenly didn't have hosting headaches. They're just a small but significant Perl shop in Melbourne Australia who do quite a lot of survey work, and who have the opportunity to get their name known more widely.
As far as the data goes, once I strip out any email addresses, everything, including the process I use for analysis (using the R statistical software for analysis and obviously perl for munging) will be going on github for anyone to do what they want with.
oops forgot. The redirect is there because once the survey is down and the analysis is up, the results will be hosted at survey.perlfoundation.org. For now there's nothing there, so it makes sense to 302 redirect to the survey. The Captcha is there to stop idiots with scripts to the maximum extent possible. There's no really good solution for this, so recaptcha apart from having external benefits was the least bad solution I could think of.