Re: Emacs Survey 2022 - design

[Timothy <tecosaur@gmail.com>]

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Hi Philip,

Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

> Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st> writes:
>> On that note, how about asking in terms of geographical regions?  E.g.:
>>
>> Where do you live?
>> - Africa
>> - Asia/Pacific (including the Indian Subcontinent)
>> - Europe
>> - North America
>> - South America
>
> I believe this is better than nationality, though a little more details
> wouldn’t be bad.  If you group the middle east with New Zealand you
> might as well not ask where people live at all.  The question seems
> interesting to get a rough idea of how popular Emacs is in different
> parts of the world, the difference between two neighbouring countries
> seems negligible.

Nationalities is a bit finer that what I think we want, but similarly I find
continents a bit too coarse.

> In this context it might also be interesting to ask what kind of
> Hardware is being used and how they perceive performance to be like.  I
> can imagine that more people in the western world will have access to
> newer and faster hardware, on which grounds they would argue for this or
> that feature to be enabled.  The survey could help show if e.g. people
> in the global south are bound to older hardware that would suffer from
> computationally intensive features.

Not a bad idea! How about a question along these lines:

┌────
│ RadioSelect(:emacs_performance,
│     "How well does Emacs perform in your experience?",
│     ["Very well, it's snappy", "Good but not great",
│         "Alright", "Not well", "Poorly, it's slugish"])
└────

As well as say a question on how many years old the hardware is.

> Another semi-unrelated question might be to estimate the popularity of
> Emacs or other editors amongst other developers they know.  I’d expect
> less interesting or consistent information to result from this, but it
> might also help draw a picture of what options people consider in what
> parts of the world.

Hmm, perhaps. I’m not sure here.

All the best,
Timothy