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As I said somewhere in the post, I am not a survey or polling professional. So, I'm sure mistakes have been made. But: I don't think many people have the same

As I said somewhere in the post, I am not a survey or polling professional. So, I'm sure mistakes have been made. But: I don't think many people have the same trouble with this question as you do. A particular type of discussion recurs with programmers, whatever their background, around which languages one has used over the years. Inevitably, people characterize their usage into a serialized narrative. For example, mine is: BASIC (C-64) -> assembler (again, C-64) -> BASIC (Amiga this time) -> C -> RealBasic -> C++ -> Java -> Python -> Scala -> Clojure. Of course there are overlaps and dozens, hundreds of "secondary" or otherwise concurrently-used languages splattered about, but that doesn't prevent most people from being able to construct that narrative. The question simply aims to find out what other people slot into the last position in their progression (or, second-to-last, if they already consider themselves to be 'Clojure programmers'). And, if there is any internal indecision about what one's primary language is, the fact that only one answer could be given forces the issue through the lens of personal identification and affinity, which is far more valuable than defining "primary" as "language spent the most time with". e.g. Even if, through some sordid turn of events, I were to spend 70% of my time programming in JavaScript, I'd still report myself as a Clojure programmer if I could only name one language.

saurik 14y ago
So, in my 70/30 example, the goal was to demonstrate that there were two reasonable paths for someone in that situation to start using Clojure, and that if this question were worded differently it would be possible to get useful information out of it: you could tell whether Clojure's "main in-mind competitor" was Python or JavaScript; this could be done in a way that even removed the mental biases of how a developer self-associates himself, because the question could be made resilient to such. After all, there is a goal to the question other than to just ask people "what're all y'r favorite languages out there in ClojureLand!", right? If not, then sure: the question as answered might be somewhat vaguely reasonable, in that it is more "free association in the mind of the person answering the question"; but if you have some actual purpose to asking, maybe to provide better "how to move from language X to Clojure" documentation, or to know on what forums and in what magazines outreach efforts should be coordinated, or to get a feel for the kinds of language and library features that people may be missing, the question as stated isn't really going to help, and may as well be replaced with the much simpler "what is your favorite non-Clojure language". Again: the developer might actually consider himself a JavaScript developer, consider JavaScript even to be the one true language that binds all other languages together and by which all other languages should be understood, and thereby is his "primary language", and yet in his world he just replaced every single moment he used to use Python with Clojure. The answer "JavaScript" is then of some vague interest, but honestly he wasn't even using JavaScript for these tasks before even though he theoretically could have been: for some reason the kind of task he is now using Clojure for was dominated before by Python in his mind, and that's what it is going to be compared to and what it is going to be replacing.

saurik 14y ago

So, in my 70/30 example, the goal was to demonstrate that there were two reasonable paths for someone in that situation to start using Clojure, and that if this question were worded differently it would be possible to get useful information out of it: you could tell whether Clojure's "main in-mind competitor" was Python or JavaScript; this could be done in a way that even removed the mental biases of how a developer self-associates himself, because the question could be made resilient to such. After all, there is a goal to the question other than to just ask people "what're all y'r favorite languages out there in ClojureLand!", right? If not, then sure: the question as answered might be somewhat vaguely reasonable, in that it is more "free association in the mind of the person answering the question"; but if you have some actual purpose to asking, maybe to provide better "how to move from language X to Clojure" documentation, or to know on what forums and in what magazines outreach efforts should be coordinated, or to get a feel for the kinds of language and library features that people may be missing, the question as stated isn't really going to help, and may as well be replaced with the much simpler "what is your favorite non-Clojure language". Again: the developer might actually consider himself a JavaScript developer, consider JavaScript even to be the one true language that binds all other languages together and by which all other languages should be understood, and thereby is his "primary language", and yet in his world he just replaced every single moment he used to use Python with Clojure. The answer "JavaScript" is then of some vague interest, but honestly he wasn't even using JavaScript for these tasks before even though he theoretically could have been: for some reason the kind of task he is now using Clojure for was dominated before by Python in his mind, and that's what it is going to be compared to and what it is going to be replacing.