Josh Adams (@knewter) used to run yearly Elixir Users Surveys from 2014 to 2017, you can see the roundup here - Elixir Users Survey 2017. It was and is a great idea. I’d love to see it become an official thing, that is, a yearly survey backed by the core team and announced everywhere Elixir devs can be found (this forum, @elixirlang Twitter, Elixir Weekly and Elixir Radar newsletters, etc.).
It would be even better if we could get support from Erlang Ecosystem Foundation and include Erlang users in the survey. Though this may be up for discussion whether there should be one survey for all BEAM users or separate ones for Elixir and Erlang.
The goal is to get some stats to see the size of the user base, which industries the language is used in, how many companies are running it in production, what are the sizes of teams using Elixir at their companies, and so on. I suggest taking a look at Go survey and Rust survey for inspiration.
I think it’s a great idea! The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation might be the right organization to do this, but then the question I’m wondering is: which Working Group should we ask about this?
I’m thinking a bit about the Marketing WG ?
–edit–
BTW, before we do this, it would be nice to include @knewter in this conversation, don’t want to take something from him.
We have several polls here (see the polls tag) however, as pointed out by @adolfont, one of the disadvantages of polls on a forum is that users can see answers by others, so may be influenced by them.
I agree that an official Elixir survey like the Rust and Go ones are the way to go (and that we stick to more general or ‘fun’ polls on the forum).
I am part of the Education, Training, & Adoption Working Group of the EEF. I have already suggested, based on this thread, that we do this survey. I am going to volunteer to help.
(and that we stick to more general or ‘fun’ polls on the forum).
