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[[!sidebar content=""]]
[[!meta title="Results of the 2022 Emacs Survey"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2022 Timothy"]]
[[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/survey-nav)" raw="yes"]]
<!-- Initially generated with emacsconf-generate-talk-page and then left alone for manual editing -->
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# Results of the 2022 Emacs Survey
Timothy (he/him, IRC: tecosaur)
[[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/survey-before)" raw="yes"]]
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
## From IRC
- Magit
- magit is more popular than org mode :-O
- Magit was more popular in 2020 too, however the gap has narrowed in the 2022 results 😀
- magit is a miracle
- I've read about people who use Emacs for magit ONLY!
- magit deserves every heart given
- I love magit and I am not even a developer so I can only imagine how amazing it is for people who use it for actual work
- Especially since for programmers, which is a large chunk of emacs users, version control is probably more important than org I would assume
- ieure, i see why people might think that, but svn is non negotiable at work. my question was: does magit do anything useful for all merging VCS that could be included in VC?
- The difference between terminal git and magit is huge for me, even as someone who doesnt use it every day
- If your repos are mostly standard source and not dependent on huge binary assets or anything, you're missing out on better VCS first and foremost
- but judging by the way users extol magit, it must do something better than vc that can be applied to all merging version control systems (non locking ones). if someone can tell me what it is and i find it useful, i might add it to vc
- I use both VC and Magit actively and I've found it's mostly about the enhanced interactivity with Git. It's very visual and also allows you to pretty much interactively set/unset flags to various Git commands as you would on the terminal but much faster all thanks to transient.el.
- +1 for transient being a big part of why people find magit easier to use.
- New versions
- We have to be careful about selection bias when it comes to versions used.
- my worry is that people on older versions are less up to date with what is going on and might not hear about the survey :/
- the way i see it packages don't really have to officially support versions of emacs older than the latest release
- unless they're big and see frequent updates for new platforms
- i.e. TRAMP
- otherwise users of older versions will just backport those packages themselves
## Feedback
- Survey framework
- oh yeah, the new framework was super pleasant to use, am a fan
- Liked how there was a way the responses were saved (locally?), and there was a possibility to resume answering later!
- from a user's perspective, the UX was amazing including download-options for my own answers. Impressive.
- I loved this year's platform too! so another +1 here
- found the pie charts a little hard to follow, e.g. what color related to that package etc. Maybe add more labeling to the chart itself?
- on that topic, some of the colors were also very close (eg. Haskell and Java in the language graph)
- I'd suggest that bar charts with more than 5 colors be labeled at the bar versus in the margin. (Also take mercy on the color blind)
- i'd suggest using a different tiled pattern for each bar instead of colors. That makes them easier to follow, especially for the color blind, or for people who cannot see colors well at night (me)
- Speaker: Hopefully this isn't too bad for the colour blind, I chose Paul Tol's colour schemes for that reason (among others)
- i took part in that survey! *proud of accomplishment*
- First, a general BIG THANK YOU for your survey!
- nice, thanks for working on all of this
- this is an amazing talk.
- org mode huge, always forget how much of that pie it brings in
- nice pie chart :)
- lobste.rs getting bigger lately?
- i am going to be interested in how the results differ when you factor out /r/emacs
- the graphics are gorgeous
- hence while I sprinkle in phrases like "within this more engaged subset of users ..." 😉
- Hmmm, I didn't think about using Emacs as my chat / email client as counting as writing prose in Emacs. But it does.
- (and the same with Org 😛)
- magit applies to many mode, there is only one org-mode ;]
- I don't think I can stop using magit
- man who are these people filling the survey in less than 10 min?
- Excellent talk! Thank you.
- thanks for the talk btw, it was very interesting
- Very informative. Nicely done!
- Excellent work, looking forward to further analysis
- Very nice presentation!
- Thanks Timothy, great talk!
- Thanks, great talk! *clapclapclap*
- Great presentation
- next year, I will join survey
- Great talk and thanks for all this nice work!!
- my compliments for your great analysis of the survey's data
## Questions and answers
- Q: will there be another survey next year as well?
- That's the plan, and the year after, etc.
- 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: are you planning to have the software used beyond Emacs surveys?
- A: It could well be, it's written as a general survey platform
- 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>
- Q: what did you use to draw the diagram in p.7?
- Inkscape
- Q: you might go into this in a second, but are there any specific questions you are looking to go into when you find the time?
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