Call for Participants: Understanding Programming Practice in the Elm Community

Show and Tell
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Hey everyone,

Some of you might know that I’m a PhD student. I’m studying audio programming language design, and looking in particular at usability through the lens of “programming practice”. Over in the audio programming space, visual programming languages are much more dominant than in other domains, but a much more interesting observation is that there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on dynamic vs static type systems.

In many ways Web development is quite similar to audio software development. Both domains accommodate various approaches to development, open exploration, strict planning/requirements, etc… I thought it would be interesting to gather a different perspective from this community and see if there’s any overlap or interesting insight. I’m working on developing a language for creating audio software specifically on the Web, and so it seems sensible to investigate what makes a good language for Web programming in addition to audio software.

You can find the survey here: https://pd-andy.github.io/elm-questionnaire

There are some demographic questions, a section where you rate your level of agreement to a bunch of statements, and then some open-ended questions – it shouldn’t take longer than 15-20 minutes. If you have any questions you can reach out to me here, or on the elm slack as @pd-andy, or you can email me at andrew.thompson@qmul.ac.uk

ps: yes the survey was made in Elm! It was something I threw together about a year ago for a different study though; the code is pretty awful. :sweat_smile:

3 Likes
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Sorry for the offtopic. I find extempore lang really inspiring in terms of language for producing music. There are more, probably you know about them already, Sonic Pi or just List of audio programming languages - Wikipedia.

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Any discussion keeps the post alive longer :sunglasses: A bit more specifically, on the audio I’m looking at languages that can be used to create interactive audio programs and not so much those ones used for computer music composition or live code performance.

That generally rules out interesting things like orca, tidal, etc but audio software development already encompasses so much that including composition or performance too would just be too broad to say anything meaningful.

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I opened the questionnaire and the first two pages worth of questions were already filled out for me. Is that a bug or did you link this before and I filled out part of the survey?

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:eyes::eyes: A while ago I linked an audio-specific version. Both surveys save to local storage and I guess its decoded the original survey.

Maybe clear cookies and refresh, it might load the old questions if they’re saved locally.

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If they were all set to “neutral” then i think it’s intentional

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They weren’t all set to neutral. Clearing local storage fixed it though.

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Yeah it’s because localstorage is per-domain and the previous survey was essentially the same elm app and hosted on the same domain.

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Done! I like that you are doing research on elm. Reminds me about the good old times writing about CSS preprocessors and naming conventions.

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Done.

Please keep sharing your progress on the research. It’s an interesting topic, and I’m especially curious about how people and languages handle the time domain.

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