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Change-Id: I1b524e4ab686dffeb0f0d1af68f4c127eedb3aac
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Run-TryBot: Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org>

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+Go 2016 Survey Results
+06 Mar 2017
+Tags: survey, community
+
+Steve Francia, for the Go team
+spf@golang.org
+
+* Thank you
+
+This post summarizes the result of our December 2016 user survey along with our commentary and insights.
+We are grateful to everyone who provided their feedback through the survey to help shape the future of Go.
+
+* Programming background
+
+Of the 3,595 survey respondents, 89% said they program in Go at work or outside of work,
+with 39% using Go both at home and at work, 27% using Go only at home, and 23% using Go only at work.
+
+We asked about the areas in which people work.
+63% said they work in web development, but only 9% listed web development alone.
+In fact, 77% chose two or more areas, and 53% chose three or more.
+
+We also asked about the kinds of programs people write in Go.
+63% of respondents write command-line programs, 60% write API or RPC services, and 52% write web services.
+Like in the previous question, most made multiple choices, with 85% choosing two or more and 72% choosing three or more.
+
+
+We asked about people’s expertise and preference among programming languages.
+Unsurprisingly, Go ranked highest among respondents’ first choices in both expertise (26%) and preference (62%).
+With Go excluded, the top five first choices for language expertise were
+Python (18%), Java (17%), JavaScript (13%), C (11%), and PHP (8%);
+and the top five first choices for language preference were
+Python (22%), JavaScript (10%), C (9%), Java (9%), and Ruby (7%).
+Go is clearly attracting many programmers from dynamic languages.
+
+
+.html survey2016/background.html
+
+* Go usage
+
+Users are overwhelmingly happy with Go:
+they agree that they would recommend Go to others by a ratio of 19:1,
+that they’d prefer to use Go for their next project (14:1),
+and that Go is working well for their teams (18:1).
+Fewer users agree that Go is critical to their company’s success (2.5:1).
+
+When asked what they like most about Go, users most commonly mentioned
+Go’s simplicity, ease of use, concurrency features, and performance.
+When asked what changes would most improve Go,
+users most commonly mentioned generics, package versioning, and dependency management.
+Other popular responses were GUIs, debugging, and error handling.
+
+When asked about the biggest challenges to their own personal use of Go,
+users mentioned many of the technical changes suggested in the previous question.
+The most common themes in the non-technical challenges were convincing others to use Go
+and communicating the value of Go to others, including management.
+Another common theme was learning Go or helping others learn,
+including finding documentation like getting-started walkthroughs,
+tutorials, examples, and best practices.
+
+Some representative common feedback, paraphrased for confidentiality:
+
+.html survey2016/quotes.html
+
+We appreciate the feedback given to identify these challenges faced by our users and community.
+In 2017 we are focusing on addressing these issues and hope to make as many significant improvements as we can.
+We welcome suggestions and contributions from the community in making these challenges into strengths for Go.
+
+.html survey2016/usage.html
+
+* Development and deployment
+
+When asked which operating systems they develop Go on,
+63% of respondents say they use Linux, 44% use MacOS, and 19% use Windows,
+with multiple choices allowed and 49% of respondents developing on multiple systems.
+The 51% of responses choosing a single system split into
+29% on Linux, 17% on MacOS, 5% on Windows, and 0.2% on other systems.
+
+
+Go deployment is roughly evenly split between privately managed servers and hosted cloud servers.
+
+
+.html survey2016/dev.html
+
+* Working Effectively
+
+We asked how strongly people agreed or disagreed with various statements about Go.
+Users most agreed that Go’s performance meets their needs (57:1 ratio agree versus disagree),
+that they are able to quickly find answers to their questions (20:1),
+and that they are able to effectively use Go’s concurrency features (14:1).
+On the other hand, users least agreed that they are able to effectively debug uses of Go’s concurrency features (2.7:1).
+
+
+Users mostly agreed that they were able to quickly find libraries they need (7.5:1).
+When asked what libraries are still missing, the most common request by far was a library for writing GUIs.
+Another popular topic was requests around data processing, analytics, and numerical and scientific computing.
+
+Of the 30% of users who suggested ways to improve Go’s documentation, the most common suggestion by far was more examples.
+
+The primary sources for Go news are the Go blog, Reddit’s /r/golang and Twitter; there may be some bias here since these are also how the survey was announced.
+
+The primary sources for finding answers to Go questions are the Go web site, Stack Overflow, and reading source code directly.
+
+.html survey2016/effective.html
+
+* The Go Project
+
+55% of respondents expressed interest in contributing in some way to the Go community and projects.
+Unfortunately, relatively few agreed that they felt welcome to do so (3.3:1) and even fewer felt that the process was clear (1.3:1).
+In 2017, we intend to work on improving the contribution process and to continue to work to make all contributors feel welcome.
+
+Respondents agree that they are confident in the leadership of the Go project (9:1),
+but they agree much less that the project leadership understands their needs (2.6:1),
+and they agree even less that they feel comfortable approaching project leadership with questions and feedback (2.2:1).
+In fact, these were the only questions in the survey for which more than half of respondents
+did not mark “somewhat agree”, “agree”, or “strongly agree” (many were neutral or did not answer).
+ 
+We hope that the survey and this blog post convey to those of you
+who are aren’t comfortable reaching out that the Go project leadership is listening.
+Throughout 2017 we will be exploring new ways to engage with users to better understand their needs.
+
+.html survey2016/project.html
+
+* Community
+
+At the end of the survey, we asked some demographic questions.
+The country distribution of responses roughly matches the country distribution of site visits to golang.org,
+but the responses under-represent some Asian countries.
+In particular, India, China, and Japan each accounted for about 5% of the site visits to golang.org in 2016
+but only 3%, 2%, and 1% of survey responses.
+
+An important part of a community is making everyone feel welcome, especially people from under-represented demographics.
+We asked an optional question about identification across a few diversity groups.
+37% of respondents left the question blank and 12% of respondents chose “I prefer not to answer”,
+so we cannot make many broad conclusions from the data.
+However, one comparison stands out: the 9% who identified as underrepresented agreed
+with the statement “I feel welcome in the Go community” by a ratio of 7.5:1,
+compared with 15:1 in the survey as a whole.
+We aim to make the Go community even more welcoming.
+We support and are encouraged by the efforts of organizations like GoBridge and Women Who Go.
+
+The final question on the survey was just for fun: what’s your favorite Go keyword?
+Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular response was `go`, followed by `defer`, `func`, `interface`, and `select`.
+
+.html survey2016/community.html