Subject: Re: [RFC] Git User's Survey 2008

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:52:28 +0200

On Tue, 24 July 2008, Stephan Beyer wrote:
> Jakub Narebski wrote:
>> Dnia środa 23. lipca 2008 16:54, Robin Rosenberg napisał
>>> onsdagen den 23 juli 2008 15.18.40 skrev Johannes Schindelin:
>>>> On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>>>>>> On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>    04. Which programming languages you are proficient with?
>>>>>>>        (The choices include programming languages used by git)
>>>>>>>        (zero or more: multiple choice)
>>>>>>>      - C, shell, Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk
>>>>>>>      + (should we include other languages, like C++, Java, PHP,
>>>>>>>         Ruby,...?)
> [...]
>> 
>> The idea is, I think, to know what languages people could contribute
>> to Git; see analysis of this question at GitSurvey2007 page on git wiki:
>>   http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2007#head-ecb5564d71e4093e2e93e508380407a26dbcbdea
> 
> Oha, is this a Git User's Survey or a Git Potential Contributor's Survey?
> I thought this is some kind of demographic question about the "programming
> background" of the user.

Well, truth to be told it is both.  We try here to kill two birds with
one stone: both to have 'programming background' of Git users, and get
to know which parts of code can have many contributors, and which
could have troubles attracting contributors because of the language
they are written in (which is visible in the choice of programming
languages in 2007 survey).
 
If we want to provide larger number of programming languages to
chose from (with "other" as fallback), we could take for example
top 10 from the TIOBE index, or similar sites:
  http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html (for July 2008)
  http://lui.arbingersys.com/index.html (Language Usage Indicators, Jul 10, 2008)

This would bring 'Visual Basic', and perhaps 'Assembly' and 'Lisp'
to the list of choices.

>> And of course "I am not programmer" response...
> 
> This doesn't make sense, does it?
>
> I know that there are non-programmer's who use git for there
> configuration files and other non-programming track files, but
> this looks somehow wrong in this survey.

You can manage documents and like (especially written in some
formatting language), you can manage web pages, you can also
use git to only _track_ some projects even if you are not
a programmer yourself.

See for example
  http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2008/06/29/git-bibs/
  http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/86
  http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=33830
  http://www.secomputing.co.uk/2008/06/engineering-log-book.html

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland