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OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

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Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#3

Post by nv-vn »

I'm a little disappointed that there's so little analysis on the free form questions.

I can't remember what I answered, so I was looking through some of these free form questions to try and identify my comments. I kept thinking something had to be me because it's word for word the same thoughts that have gone through my head 100s of times as a long-time OCaml user. Unfortunately, it feels like these are getting ignored because there's so little commentary on them (though I doubt that's actually the case).

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#4

Post by yawaramin »

A couple of the questions were multiple-choice, e.g.:

> If I was granted one new language feature today, I would ask for:

They commented about it:

> This was a tough question because only one choice was allowed, and the order in which the choices were listed may have influenced the replies. In retrospect, multiple choices presented in a randomized order would have been better.

This is actually one of my pet peeves about many surveys (and indeed, electoral systems)--they often use single-choice answer format (plurality voting i.e. radio button) when they should really be using multi-choice format (approval voting i.e. checkboxes). I said as much when the results were initially announced:

> There’s no reason to restrict the question to only one option, and allowing multiple choices (i.e., approval voting), allows people to express preferences in a more nuanced way so you get a more accurate overall view of what the community is interested in.

(from https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-ocaml-user-survey-2020/6624/... )

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#5

Post by zulu314 »

reasonML / reasonML + bucklescript amount to about 25%, it's been out for 4 years while CAML was out for 30+.

Yet the wording makes it sound like it's disappointing "used by only 25%", "maybe the survey was not advertized enough in the Reason community".

Actually, the fact that someone can show up with a transpiler that makes the language curly braces friendly and get 25% market share just like that is just puzzling.

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#6

Post by yawaramin »

zulu314 wrote: post #5

reasonML / reasonML + bucklescript amount to about 25%, it's been out for 4 years while CAML was out for 30+. Yet the wording makes it sound like it's disappointing "used by only 25%", "maybe the survey was not advertized enough in the Reason community". Actually, the fact that someone can show up with a transpiler that makes the language curly braces friendly and get 25% market share just like that is just puzzling.

The majority of the Reason/ReScript community for sure did not fill out this survey. There is a large selection bias for OCaml. One of the obvious indicators: 191 of the respondents work in banking/finance sector.

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#7

Post by zulu314 »

yawaramin wrote: post #6
zulu314 wrote: post #5

reasonML / reasonML + bucklescript amount to about 25%, it's been out for 4 years while CAML was out for 30+. Yet the wording makes it sound like it's disappointing "used by only 25%", "maybe the survey was not advertized enough in the Reason community". Actually, the fact that someone can show up with a transpiler that makes the language curly braces friendly and get 25% market share just like that is just puzzling.

The majority of the Reason/ReScript community for sure did not fill out this survey. There is a large selection bias for OCaml. One of the obvious indicators: 191 of the respondents work in banking/finance sector.

So? Bucklescript was invented at Bloomberg IIRC

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#8

Post by yawaramin »

zulu314 wrote: post #7
yawaramin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of the Reason/ReScript community for sure did not fill out this survey. There is a large selection bias for OCaml. One of the obvious indicators: 191 of the respondents work in banking/finance sector.

So? Bucklescript was invented at Bloomberg IIRC

It was created originally at Bloomberg but I've never heard of that level of adoption internally in BBG. Nowadays from what I've seen the highest adoption is at various web devs in Europe and US.

Re: OCaml User Survey 2020 Results

#9

Post by slondr »

toolslive wrote: post #2

minor nit pick: "Which types of software do you develop with OCaml?" Others: .... Object Storage. object storage. I think these 2 can be joined ;)

There's plenty of duplicates like this in the open-ended responses. They just printed them all as-is.
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