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Don't you think there's the tiniest chance that 3.X users will over-represent themselves in a nonrandom survey just as they do amongst the developers? This is

Don't you think there's the tiniest chance that 3.X users will over-represent themselves in a nonrandom survey just as they do amongst the developers? This is laughable: "we asked people with a vested interest in seeming more numerous than they are to take our survey. And they did. Reassuring!"

toyg 13y ago
I don't think py3 devs "over-represent" themselves at all. If anything, it's very fashionable to proudly announce that py3 is a waste of time and you're never going to use it.
- saurik 13y ago
  The problem is more that this is a biased representation: if people on the Python development mailing list (which I can't imagine spends much time talking about Python 2 ;P), people who care enough about Python to still be on Usenet using comp.lang.python (although they seem to actually mean the official Python user mailing list, given the hyperlink...), and the programming hipster crowd from Hacker News (which is one of the few communities I am a part of that seems to remotely like Python 3) are at this low of a representation, the average developer base is going to be much lower ;P. Given this prior expected distribution, these results are thereby quite damning evidence against Python 3... (which matches the less intrinsically flawed, although still problematic in the other direction, data from a few days ago that less than 2% of downloads from the Python Package Index are from Python 3 (this is problematic as this is likely biased somewhat by production websites that are spawned and download packages over and over and over again; that said, that expectation itself is demonstration of the relative strength of Python 2, and could even be considered an ignorable bias if the question is not to measure users but instead to measure importance).
takluyver 13y ago
We ran a user survey for IPython, where there's little reason to expect a bias towards Python 3 users. 22% said they use IPython with Python 3.3 (they could select more than one answer). I guess early adopters may be more likely to answer surveys, but from this and bug reports, it does feel like there's a growing minority using Python 3.

toyg 13y ago

I don't think py3 devs "over-represent" themselves at all. If anything, it's very fashionable to proudly announce that py3 is a waste of time and you're never going to use it.

saurik 13y ago
The problem is more that this is a biased representation: if people on the Python development mailing list (which I can't imagine spends much time talking about Python 2 ;P), people who care enough about Python to still be on Usenet using comp.lang.python (although they seem to actually mean the official Python user mailing list, given the hyperlink...), and the programming hipster crowd from Hacker News (which is one of the few communities I am a part of that seems to remotely like Python 3) are at this low of a representation, the average developer base is going to be much lower ;P. Given this prior expected distribution, these results are thereby quite damning evidence against Python 3... (which matches the less intrinsically flawed, although still problematic in the other direction, data from a few days ago that less than 2% of downloads from the Python Package Index are from Python 3 (this is problematic as this is likely biased somewhat by production websites that are spawned and download packages over and over and over again; that said, that expectation itself is demonstration of the relative strength of Python 2, and could even be considered an ignorable bias if the question is not to measure users but instead to measure importance).

takluyver 13y ago

We ran a user survey for IPython, where there's little reason to expect a bias towards Python 3 users. 22% said they use IPython with Python 3.3 (they could select more than one answer). I guess early adopters may be more likely to answer surveys, but from this and bug reports, it does feel like there's a growing minority using Python 3.