Suggestions for the design of Survey.jl?

iuliadmtru
Fri, 26 Aug 2022 13:38:01 +0000
Statistics

Hello,

We are building Survey.jl, a package for statistical estimates from surveys. The inspiration for the package comes from the corresponding R survey package created by Thomas Lumley.

We started out imitating the R API to make the transition from R to Julia easier. Along the way we decided to switch to a more Julia-specific design while still addressing the transition problem by using wrappers for the R-like API or documentation notes. The Julia way, emphasising multiple dispatch, yields clean code and opens the way for bazaar-style development of sub-components by multiple different people.

In the R world there is an entire ecosystem that has arisen on top of the survey package, such as srvyr or svrepmisc. We hope to accomplish the same kind of growth with our package. This is why we bring forward this discussion regarding the design that should be adopted for Survey.jl. The key questions are:

How can we make the transition from R to Julia easier?

How can the current design be improved to provide a good user experience?

Can we improve on the R package in terms of functionality?

Any involvement and suggestion would be of great help, particularly if you have experience with statistics and/or survey analysis.

4 posts - 4 participants