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# Results of the 2022 Emacs Survey
Timothy (he/him, IRC: tecosaur)
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If I am giving this talk, then a month ago the 2022 Emacs Survey will
have occurred! I will go through the motivations, implementation,
results, and plans of the Emacs Survey.
Outline:
- A quick overview of the main results of the 2022 Emacs Survey
- Discussion of motivation, implementation, and future plans
# Discussion
## Notes
- 2020: 7000 participants in the survey (Adrien Brochard)
- 2022: new survey framework: julia (language) + Genie Framework
- 2022: 6600 responses (1000 partial); 115 nations; 96% male (better
among younger people)
- the plots are using Makie, a Julia plotting library
## Questions and answers
- Q: Do Emacs developers take into account the survey results? I mean,
they are volunteers working on what they find useful/interesting for
them, which is of course great.
- A: There's no obligation for emacs-devel or Emacs package
maintainers to do anything in response to the survey results,
but hopefully the results will be able to inform development
choices they make.
- Q: Is the survey software available in source code via
Gitlab/Github/...? What's the license?
- A: Yep, it's GPL-3, and the source is availible at
<https://git.tecosaur.net/tec/emacs-survey>
- Q: Are the raw results available so we can run some data analysis
ourselves?
- A: Indeed! As mentioned in the talk they're publically
availible in a number of formats, e.g.
- <https://emacssurvey.org/results/3425413930.csv>
- <https://emacssurvey.org/results/3425413930.json>
- <https://emacssurvey.org/results/3425413930.db>
- Q: Any specific reason why you chose Julia as a language to code the
survey (curious about it)?
- A: I use it a lot, and like doing so :)
- Q: Do you have any insight on the degree of selection bias (the
respondents may represent a very particular segment of the overall
users, in terms of motivation to respond). The nb of days of
response after announce may indicate that respondents are very much
in touch with emacs news.
- A: We can try to look at the degree to which the survey referrer
(r/emacs, HN, etc.) changes the survey results, but ultimately
this is a hard question. At the end of the day, the way I view
things is we can just do our best to investigate how much of an
effect is seen in the results, but this is the best shot we have
availible.
- A2: That said, we can compare a few particular statistics to
other surveys done in a wider population to gauge how close our
results are to them, but that assumes that those other surveys
(e.g. Stack Overflow's developer survey) are themselves
representative of the Emacs user base, itself can be quite an
assumption.
- Q: Are the pies in gnuplot or something else?
- A: The plots are using Makie, a Julia plotting library.
- Q: Thoughts on an emacs package to fill out the survey? Just more
work for you ;)
- A: Hopefully more work for someone else ;)
- Q: Is the survey framework open sourced already or still in the
works?
- A: (replied above, IIUC) it's GPL-3 and the source is available
at <https://git.tecosaur.net/tec/emacs-survey>
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