For the past two years I have organised a Nim community survey and launched it on the 23rd of June (for reference: 2016 and 2017 results). That deadline is coming up very quickly again, but this year I wanted to ask our community for suggestions of what we should/shouldn't ask again.
I will be basing the new survey on last year's survey, for reference here is a copy of it that you can go through to see the questions that were asked last year (as well as how they were asked): https://goo.gl/forms/Tixn6wx7kbczLVk43. Note that some questions are only accessible depending on what answers you give to the first few questions.
So yeah, please let me know what you would like to see asked in this survey. Also if there are questions you think are pointless also let me know, I'd like to remove some questions too.
Perhaps something like:
What elements of Nim are you currently familiar with?
1= Still a mystery 6= Know it like the back of my hand
...?
There's more of them: object variants term-rewriting macros (very different from macros)
And also ask people if they know what NEP-1 is
Try to give ready-made options (in addition to freeform answers) to questions, because people are lazy and it eases statistical analysis.
For example:
How could we help make Nim more accepted at your company?
[] N/A, I don't work in a company/society that does coding
[] Nothing, we are already convinced
[] Nothing, our company is unlikely to adopt Nim anyway
[] Nim is almost there, just keep working as usual
[] Release 1.0 ("No more breaking changes, please")
[] Establish some formal society (association, corporation, foundation)
[] Offer at least two independent implementations
[] Prove to us that Nim compiler is safe to use (no segfaults, memory leaks, etc.)
[] Polish documentation (language reference, guides, error messages, etc.)
[] Give us references to persuasive examples of Nim in production
[] We need a framework a la Rails, Django, Spring, Laravel, ...
[] We need an alternative high quality editor to VSCode
[] Something else: __________________________________________
(edit as you wish)
In addition to the previous survey questions and the responses here, when there is some Nim thread on Reddit/HN people usually complain about lack of (or poor) documentation.
Ask users how to improve documentation, what should be the priorities, do we need more (runnable) examples or more textual descriptions (or both), etc.
Also, ask about the release cycle. Should newer (minor) versions be released more frequently, less frequently (really? :P) or is it good as it is right now (when most of us use the devel version because stable is severely outdated)?
Oh, and ask users if they think we will see v1.0 this year :D
On a more serious note, I'd like some views about tooling and common criticism if they still apply after using Nim:
@Allin the issue with ready-made options is that they introduce a lot of bias, at this scale I still think all opinion-based questions should be free-form.
Questions to ask:
What is the most important misconception for Nim (wrong design decision)?
What language would you like to use when Nim is not available?
What language did Nim replace for you, and for what use case/purpose?
What language do you still use instead of Nim, and for what use case/purpose?
What percentage of your current programming uses Nim?