State of Elm 2018 Questions (Draft 1)

[brian]

I’m thinking about the questions for this year’s State of Elm survey, and am at the point where I could use some feedback on them.

So, here they are with questions below.

1. Do you use Elm?

   • Yes, at work
   • Yes, in side projects
   • Yes, as a student
   • I used to, but don’t any more
   • No, but I’m curious about it
   • No, and I don’t intend to

2. In which domains are you applying Elm?

   In prior years, this has been things like “healthcare” and “education”.

3. How long have you been using Elm?

   This is a scale with a small number of months, then a small number of years.

4. How far along is your most mature Elm project?

   Options:

   • Considering for a future project
   • In the planning / learning / exploration phase
   • In development
   • In staging
   • Shipped / released to users / in production

5. Is that project at…

   work, side project, open source

6. What versions of Elm are you using?

7. What is your level of experience with functional programming?

8. What programming community are you “coming from?”

   Last year this was “what language”. Note on this question: “none” or “new programmer” should be encouraged as a valid answer.

9. Where do you go for Elm news and discussion?

10. What did/do you use to learn Elm?

    Resources, classes, et cetera?

11. Is there an Elm meetup near you?

12. What’s the nearest big city to you?

13. Do you format your code with elm-format?

    Same answers as last year, essentially:

    • yes, and I prefer it
    • no, I don’t like it
    • no, but I’ve heard of it
    • no, and I’ve never heard of it

14. What do you like the most about your use of Elm?

15. What has been the biggest pain point in your use of Elm?

16. When you have to integrate with JavaScript, what’s usually the reason?

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My questions about these questions:

1. Do they answer the things we want to know about the community?
2. Is there a better place to host this than Typeform? I’d basically like to populate autocomplete for fill-in-the-blanks with sanitized answers from last year.
3. How can we measure the maturity question? It’s a bit awkward.
4. Last year a few people noted that it was very industry-focused. That was intentional, but how can we make these questions more approachable to, say, students? Or non-users?

[robin.heggelund]

Only thing I’ve got to note about the questions is Q1. Wouldn’t it be strange if people taking an Elm language survey answered “No, and I don’t intend to”? And if they did, what good would the rest of the answers be for the Elm community?

1. Personally, I’d like to know how people are dealing with styles. Are people using regular css, elm-css, styled-elements, etc.

[brian]

That’s a good question. I knew it would raise some eyebrows! Basically, people totally just answer these surveys in the situation that they never intend to use the language but have Opinions™. I want to regard their responses differently (read: very lightly, if at all.)

[avh4]

I’d like to see something about automated testing; the most important being “what things/how much do you test in your Elm projects”, and if there’s room for two questions, maybe also “what tools do you use for testing your Elm projects”.

I think another useful question would be what tooling do you when developing your elm projects, with checkboxes to select from elm-test, elm-reactor, elm-server, elm-brunch, webpack, etc.

[brian]

To both of you, then: what data would you hope to get out of those responses? What questions would it help us to answer? I thought of adding tooling questions but can’t think of an answer to that myself.

[robin.heggelund]

For styling, it’s a question I see ever now and again on slack. I think the main benefits of having a styling question in the survey are:

1. Promotes cool stuff like elm-css and styled-elements
2. If people are not using such projects, then why? Do they need more exposure, more focus in tutorials…? Or maybe people just don’t have a problem with css?
3. Are people comfortable using regular css, or do people prefer to skip css altogether and just focus on the higher level details.

CSS seems to be the one frontend thing where Elm hasn’t really landed yet (for me, anyway), and so it would be interesting to know more about how people are handling that part of frontend development.

[David_Legard]

I’d like to see a question like "What is the one major feature you would like to see in Elm?" Alternatively, “What do you see as the biggest missing part of Elm right now?”

For me, it would be database access.

[avh4]

For the tooling question, the hope would be to identify whether or not and how strongly people are dissatisfied by the official tools, and to identify the popular solutions so the features could be looked at to improve the official tools. Specific questions the data could answer: do people tend to use elm-reactor and if not, what do they use instead; how many people prefer alternatives to the elm-test runner. (I guess the stuff about brunch/webpack/etc are less important to me, though maybe it’s useful to know which build systems are most important to support)

The purpose for the “what do you test” question is to get a sense of the overall community’s perspective on testing, since most of the existing tools have been built based on the preferences of those who’ve built the tools.

[brian]

I’d like to see a question like “What is the one major feature you would like to see in Elm?”

That’s “what has been the biggest pain point in your use of Elm”. The responses from that last year sufficiently covered that facet. I bet they will again this year.

[brian]

Ok, I’m really loving these questions. I think we can probably add a couple more before people drop off. I’ll see if I can work them in to the next draft.

[brian]

Ok, here’s that next draft. I’ve grouped the questions and bolded the new ones.

Some specific questions:

• @avh4: how useful is getting the data about elm-format? I’m inclined to leave that question in this year because I’d like to see if there’s any year-over-year change. But if you don’t think it’s intrinsically valuable, it could get dropped.
• Is there any way we could make this more accessible to students / beginners?

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Your Background

1. Do you use Elm?
   • Yes, at work
   • Yes, in side projects
   • Yes, as a student
   • I used to, but don’t any more
   • No, but I’m curious about it
   • No, and I don’t intend to
2. What is your level of experience with functional programming?
3. What programming community are you “coming from?” (changed from “what language”) (note on this question: “none” should be encouraged as a valid answer.)
4. Where do you go for Elm news and discussion?
5. What did/do you use to learn Elm? (resources, classes, et cetera?)
6. Is there a local Elm meetup near you?
7. What’s the nearest big city to you?

Where do you use Elm?

8. In which domains are you applying Elm?
9. How long have you been using Elm?
10. How far along is your most mature Elm project?
    1. Considering for a future project <- not great
    2. In the planning / learning / exploration phase
    3. In development
    4. In staging
    5. Shipped / released to users / in production
11. Is that project at… work, side project, open source
12. What versions of Elm are you using?

How do you use Elm?

14. Do you format your code with elm-format?
15. What tools or frameworks do you use to style your Elm applications? (“I just write plain 'ol CSS” is an acceptable answer here!)
16. What tools do you use to build your Elm projects?
17. What tools do you use to test your Elm projects?
18. What do you write tests for in your Elm projects?
19. What do you like the most about your use of Elm?
20. What has been the biggest pain point in your use of Elm?
21. When you have to integrate with JavaScript, what’s usually the reason?

[tylerthehaas]

In addition to the background questions I think it would be beneficial to learn what it is about Elm that attracted them to the language.

[brian]

I love it! Thank you!

[rasputin303]

I’d be interested to know what proportion of Elm users are also professional programmers/software developers, and what proportion are casual/hobbyist programmers. I recently went to an Elm meetup and it seemed like almost everyone did some kind of programming as a day job (although not too many were using Elm at work). But maybe it’s just that hobbyists like me don’t usually go to meetups?

[brian]

d be interested to know what proportion of Elm users are also professional programmers/software developers, and what proportion are casual/hobbyist programmers.

I think the options in question 1 answer this. Is there another shade of this that I’m not thinking of?

[rasputin303]

Well, like, “I use Elm in side projects from my regular job as a Java programmer” seems to me slightly different from “I use Elm in side projects from my regular job as a dentist/personal trainer/accountant”. I’m not sure those are really quite the same kind of Elm users or have the same experience. But maybe I am splitting hairs?

[dan]

I think questions about community could be nice:

• Do you go to Elm meetups? (this is probably included in question 6)
• How do you use the Elm slack?
• Where do you go for help?

[adeschamps]

I’m interested in the demographics of Elm users. I’ve had a few people ask me recently about the gender ratio in tech, and I usually pull up the stats from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey. While web-dev is already less male-heavy than the industry as a whole, my hypothesis is that the Elm community is a bit closer to an even ratio.