I found the survey to be extremely confusing to the point where I didn’t finish the questions nor submitted my response.
In particular I feel like the response alternatives are not fitting the questions. Here are some concrete points about some of the more confusing (to me) things:
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For Q1 (“How frequently do you use each of the following languages?”) I think it would be better with alteratives “Daily”, “Weekly”, “Monthly”, “More seldom” instead of “Great deal”, “Some” and “None” which seems to be very much up for interpretation.
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For Q4 (“Thinking only about the NON-TECHNICAL aspects or features of Julia, what are the aspects or features you like MOST about Julia?”) the response alternative “Learning a new language - I like learning new languages” should be “Julia is a young language” or something instead. “I like learning new language” is not a feature of Julia (although perhaps it is a feature of the person responding??).
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The response alternatives to Q5 (“Thinking only about the TECHNICAL aspects or features of Julia, what are the aspects or features you like LEAST about Julia?”) seems very “suggestive”. All of the alternatives feels like responses/comments you would get if you ask “What do you dislike about Julia?” with a free-form response field instead of “features or aspects” that you can like/dislike. Just to comment on some examples from the response alternatives:
- “Not stable enough”: Maybe better phrased as “Stability” to make it a “aspect that you can dislike”.
- “Doesn’t have all the packages I need”: Maybe better stated as just “Package ecosystem”. If “Doesn’t have all the packages I need” is an aspect about the language, then if you DO think it has the packages you need, should you select this one since it is double negative?
- “Package manager is confusing, difficult or doesn’t do what I expect it to do”: Is this really a feature or established aspect about Julia…
- etc…
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For Q6 it is essentially the same as the previous points: most of the response alteratives are not “features or aspects” that you can like/dislike which makes it really hard to connect the response alternatives to the question. They all seem more like statements you can agree/disagree with instead of things you can like/dislike. For example: “I don’t like learning a new language” doesn’t seem like a feature of the language, but more like a respons to “Why are you not using Julia?”.
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For the question pairs about things you like/dislike (Q3+Q5 and Q4+Q6) I think it would be much better to just have a single list of (actual) “features and aspects” to be used in both of them. For example why can I like “Speed and performance” but not dislike it? It seems very “guided” somehow as if “Speed and performance” is an established truth that you can only agree with.
Hopefully this feedback is useful and the survey can be improved for next year and maybe I can answer then!