Final Perl Survey Grant Report
The final report for the Perl Survey is now available, after many delays. The report is fairly bare bones, but it should be sufficient for you to get a handle on the structure of the Perl community (or at least the sample who responded to the survey). I've gone for the approach that I'm presenting salient findings, rather than overwhelming you with detail.
There is a lot of data summarised in this report, and rather than producing a long turgid document with every possible analysis that I can think of, I thought that the better way to approach things would be to make a fairly short summary report so that people can ask questions, or request any additional information via the comments here, by email, or by grabbing me (kd) on irc.perl.org.
The most important outcome from this grant is that all of the R code I've written is solid enough ensure that we can run the survey again in a couple of years time, and quickly get longitudinal comparitive data out of it (so long as the questions remain reasonably similar). R isn't the easiest language in the world to work with, and I'm pretty pleased with some of the data management gymnastics I performed in getting the survey data management tools working reasonably well.
Oh yes, the data and analysis is freely redistributable under the same conditions as Perl itself :)
Catalyst hacker, management researcher and health informatician.
"Interestingly most respondents seem to have been programming in perl for about the same amount of time they've been programming computers for - indicating that Perl is a very sticky programming language, at least for the sample who answered this survey." - because of how the survey was organized you will not have in this sample many people who stopped programming in Perl - so this only means that people already programming in some other language don't go and learn Perl - i.e. learning it is not too popular.
Thanks for the input :)
I've dealt with your comment here.
I've just beein in a conference on the Leximancer text exploration software , so I've generated a sharable report. If you're interested in the answers to the open-ended questions about the best, worst and most frustrating things about perl, please check the report here. The report will disappear when my trial license of the software expires, so only until the 31st of December this year.