Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Jean Louis]

* Philip K. <philipk@posteo.net> [2020-10-11 21:42]:
> Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> writes:
> 
> > * Philip K. <philipk@posteo.net> [2020-10-10 12:37]:
> >> 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?
> >
> > As I have done larger surveys for public relations and I know methods,
> > I know how tedious it is to evaluate such survey, we have been
> > employing many people, like 20 people, to just analyze what exactly
> > did people check or did not check, what did they write, to read their
> > handwriting, and then to properly analyze it.
> >
> > However, Emacs feature requests or survey about using Emacs need live
> > user, not user as a number.
> 
> Of course, but there are still numbers that describe aggregate
> phenomenons that individual users don't actively notice. A question I
> would be interested in is what the correlation is between people who use
> specific configuration-templates (Doom, Spacemacs, etc.) and how long
> they have been using Emacs/Age. Depending on what the results are, we
> would have a batter guess as to whether the popularity of these
> templates is just because newer users aren't secure in configuring their
> own Emacs, or if people just like these templates in general (what they
> like is individual, that's where plain text responses are
> interesting).

I have the book of I guess Robert Kyosaki here, I cannot find at
moment exact reference, the idea I got from the book (or maybe not),
is that surveys can be done easily, one can start asking even less
number of users and with simple questions, and one will very soon find
a pattern that becomes very probable final survey result.

As those configuration templates are located on Microsoft Github, one
way to make the survey or find out that information is to submit the
issue there in each configuration, and simply ask them, you will find
out.

Another fact is that developers of those configurations obviously
already did their own analysis on what is needed and wanted and
produced that what became popular configuration. Their survey is
already done. Thus if Spacemacs configuration is most popular, then
core Emacs developers could use those results of established famous
features and see if anything could be implemented easier from
upstream. 

My personal view point on Spacesmacs, Doom, etc. is that those group
of people like shiny, like showing off their theming, they have time
for their hobby, but I have not researched enough, did not install any
of those, I don't even install external themes, I use only those built
ins.