Hi, as a little Sunday evening statistics and visualization nerding relaxation, I tried to see if I can visualize where the committee members stand on the various kinds of extensions. It seems that “Principal Component Analysis” might be a good fit. In the ~100 dimensional space where each of our ballots inhabits one point, it identifies the primary (and secondary) direction along which we are most diverse (I think). One nice thing is that this produces a two dimensional chart. I was _hoping_ to maybe see “heavy type hackery” and “lots of syntactic sugar” emerge as the two main directions. Well, let’s look at pca.png first… Not quite surprising, we see Tom relatively isolated (Tom voted for 7 extensions that nobody else voted for, and was in general very liberal). Also Iavor is somewhat far off, also not surprising, given his reluctance to go all in on GADTs/TypeFamilies etc. Surprisingly, Richard is quite close to him! Simon PJ and me are very close to each other, and somewhere in the middle, and the others seem to have quite an opposite stand from Iavor in the second principal components? Can we understand these two directions? They are essentially (I believe) eigenvectors in the ~100-dimensional space. I tried to visualize them by another scatter plot, see vectors.png. There, we can see that one’s vote for StarIsType contributes a lot towards the primary principal component, and one for Unicode a lot towards the secondary. We see GADTs and TypeFamilies on the far bottom, and FunDeps not far. This indicates that the y-axis really might be the “heavy type level programming” axis (with type level programming features causing negative numbers). I can’t quite make sense of the x-axis though… I stopped short of coloring the points in this graph by “extension cateogry”… So, no big conclusions to be drawn from this. Also, I am definitely no expert in the Data Sciences, so this may be misguided, or simply wrong. If someone wants to give it a better shot, please do! I am happy to provide the raw data in a simple accessible form. Cheers, Joachim -- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
