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I am not a pollster but by combining different facts into single options you are restricting the information you can gain from your poll or polls.
I taught C to engineering students at a university, I know it thoroughly, I haven't written a line of it in 12 years - the only option I can logically choose is the final option.
As a first reaction I thought, well, more than 50% of HNers fluent with C, the average age should be pretty high probably. But then I realized that actually the average HN age is probably around 25 (from other pools I saw here), so I guess, there are still a lot of fresh programmers learning C. I really hope so. I love higher level programming languages and spent a lot of time with Tcl, Scheme, FORTH, Joy, Ruby, and…
Already around '95 or so Perl was widely used, GUIs could be done in things like Tcl/Tk, basic apps were starting to move onto the web, desktop stuff was mostly in C++.
You learned C when you wanted to work on things like kernels or databases or high-performance daemons and whatnot. That's still mostly the case. Java has eaten into that a little bit, but that's not even a new phenomenon.
The things that people used C for 15 years ago are still the same things that it's used for today, and similarly, you didn't have to write stuff in C 15 years ago if you just wanted to bang out some little utility or "CGI script". I expect things to stay that way until there's some language which could reasonably replace C in its niche. Thusfar one has not emerged.
I know C but none of those categories apply to me. Poll design is useful skill to learn! I am not a pollster but by combining different facts into single options you are restricting the information you can gain from your poll or polls. I taught C to engineering students at a university, I know it thoroughly, I haven't written a line of it in 12 years - the only option I can logically choose is the final option.
As a first reaction I thought, well, more than 50% of HNers fluent with C, the average age should be pretty high probably. But then I realized that actually the average HN age is probably around 25 (from other pools I saw here), so I guess, there are still a lot of fresh programmers learning C. I really hope so. I love higher level programming languages and spent a lot of time with Tcl, Scheme, FORTH, Joy, Ruby, and…
I'm 30, and from Googling you seem to be 3 years older than me, but I don't think the use case for learning C has changed all that much over the course of my time as a programmer. Already around '95 or so Perl was widely used, GUIs could be done in things like Tcl/Tk, basic apps were starting to move onto the web, desktop stuff was mostly in C++. You learned C when you wanted to work on things like kernels or databas…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that it you are attempting to measure two different things with the same question: depth of knowledge and frequency of usage. It's possible that someone knows C quite well, but no longer (or never) uses it. It's similar to offering 3 options for Marital Status: Single, Married or Divorced. It's impossible to interpret the results in any meaningful way (Divorced and single? Divorced and remarried? Is it…
I was more trying to provide a 1-5 type scale with some guidelines on how to vote. The sentences in the options should be ORed together more so than ANDed. What if I added a phrase to option two: "Or I learned C extensively at one point, remember most of it, but don't use it regularly anymore" and to option three: "Or I learned C extensively at one point, but have forgotten most of it and don't use it anymore?"
As a first reaction I thought, well, more than 50% of HNers fluent with C, the average age should be pretty high probably. But then I realized that actually the average HN age is probably around 25 (from other pools I saw here), so I guess, there are still a lot of fresh programmers learning C. I really hope so. I love higher level programming languages and spent a lot of time with Tcl, Scheme, FORTH, Joy, Ruby, and…
Well, it seems the old stigma against multi-language systems is fading. Even 5 years ago, it was more or less "the rule" that you chose one language for a project and you had to live with whatever trade-offs that choice left you with. Now, people are more willing to accept that you can write much of your system in a language designed for programmer convenience and only write the bottlenecks in a more performance-orie…
As a first reaction I thought, well, more than 50% of HNers fluent with C, the average age should be pretty high probably. But then I realized that actually the average HN age is probably around 25 (from other pools I saw here), so I guess, there are still a lot of fresh programmers learning C. I really hope so. I love higher level programming languages and spent a lot of time with Tcl, Scheme, FORTH, Joy, Ruby, and…
That being said, I'm an "average age" HNer that has worked with (and loved working with) C. I'm looking for excuses to work with it more, although it doesn't really intersect with my type of work (statistics).
Maybe I should contribute to Redis or other OSS...any suggestions?