Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Philip K.]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > The most obvious reason to me is that user error handling is pretty
>   > poor. Because there is no JS, we cannot offer front-end validation, that
>   > means that the backend server is responsible for validating fields
>   > submitted.
>
> If we want to learn what users think, we should not limit their
> responses to a small set of 'valid" possible answers.  The plan
> I designed for inquiries asks users to answer in their own words.

But wouldn't that make it needlessly hard to analyse the results,
especially if the question should be numerically quantified? I get the
value of plain text responses, but recognizing that the answer to the
question "how long have you been using emacs", could result in:

- "Since 1996"
- "24 Years"
- "January 1996"
- "Around the second time Clinton got sworn into office"
- "1896" (but actually a typo)

All of these basically mean the same, but the effort to recognize this
automatically (which would be necessary, if you want to see how factors
correlate) would not be worth it.

-- 
        Philip K.