Am Mittwoch, 8. März 2006 11:25 schrieb John Hughes:
When I surveyed Haskell users, I asked respondents to name the most important tools and libraries they use. (Caveat: respondents saw the list of tools and libraries already named, and could include these just by selecting them, so tools mentioned early in the survey were more likely to be named by subsequent respondents). Here are a few relevant entries, where the percentage is the proportion of respondents who named the tool:
29% Parsec 19% wxHaskell 16% QuickCheck 16% haddock 12% Monadic Parser Combinators 11% Gtk2Hs 9% hs-plugins 8% HaXml 7% Data.* 7% Monad foundation classes 6% Arrows 6% HOpenGL
The list includes all libraries named by more than 5% of respondents. Sure enough, wxHaskell and Gtk2Hs are more popular, but 6% naming HOpenGL as among the "most important" libraries is quite respectable.
Well, I've never said that it is among the "most important" libraries, but OTOH I really much doubt that the way the survey was done delivers anything near reliable results. It heavily biases early entries, and I dare to speculate that the people taking part in the survey were probably not even near to a representative group, but a bunch of highly motivated, experienced non-Joe-Programmer kind of people who are actively participating on the mailing lists etc. Furthermore, some of the percentages above are extremely strange, e.g. how can people use huge GUI toolkits with 30% while staying largely away from something as fundamental as Data.*? The best we can probably get from your survey is a rough indication what the research community wants, but probably nothing more. I don't claim to have a better idea how to get more reliable numbers, but I've never trusted any web survey and probably never will. Cheers, S.