Syntax poll

[Mikael Grev]

Sounds good. I wasn't aware of the master plan as it hadn't been given away.

It's important to have the "whole picture" in order to answer questions or you make assumptions, like I did.

Cheers,
Mikael

On Jun 11, 2011, at 18:41 PM, Brian Goetz wrote:

> Your arguments make sense, but you make a lot of questionable assumptions (this is the only poll I intend to do, that this is the only audience I intend to poll, that I intend to base my decisions solely (or even at all) on the results of this poll, that the goal of this poll was to select a winner, etc.)
> 
> I do want to ask the "target drivers" eventually.  But I would almost certainly phrase the questions differently to the "drivers" than to the "theoretical physicists".  I might want to refine my poll questions based on small "trial" polls, or polls of communities with specific characteristics.  I may want to eliminate options which might be popular with drivers but which the experts have good reasons to think are bad ideas.  In any given study, I may be looking for hidden correlations and clustering (such as "people who like X like Y") rather than "which do people like best".
> 
> Further, I might ask questions to different populations separately, to identify whether the populations have different characteristics. (Thought experiment: if you discovered "the experts love X, but the drivers hate it", wouldn't that be really thought-provoking data which would affect your data gathering / decision making process?)
> 
> Bottom line: there are lots of good reasons we might be taking this approach.  This is an iterative process.  (Politicians do lots of polls before election day.)
> 
> So, let's take for sake of argument that the data resulting from polling this group has value.  My question was: is that experiment even practical to do?
> 
> 
>> Brian,
>> 
>> If you wanted to know how a car should handle in traffic, would you
>> poll the doctors in theoretical physics that are the experts on the
>> differential equations in the suspension, or would you ask the target
>> audience drivers?
>> 
>> One should always ask in the middle of the bell curve, if they
>> understand the question. When it comes to the extreme technical
>> details of this proposal I think they don't, but when it comes to
>> syntax I think they do.
>> 
>> There are one reason not to ask them and that's if you are afraid
>> they'll make the "wrong" choice. But then you shouldn't ask anyone
>> and instead make the decision on what you believe is the right choice
>> and motivate that.
>> 
>> Cheers, Mikael
>> 
>> On Jun 11, 2011, at 17:38 PM, Brian Goetz wrote:
>> 
>>>> Yes, I was chastised for daring to mention it publicly at
>>>> http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/06/lambda-syntax and according to
>>>> comments there, it appears that the 100 vote limit has already
>>>> been exceeded.
>>> 
>>> For everyone's benefit: what I was trying to do here was poll the
>>> lambda-dev community, not the entire Java developer community.  I
>>> wanted to get the sense from a small group that had already been
>>> thinking about the issue for a while, and had seen most of the
>>> alternatives at least once before, not a mass poll of people who
>>> were seeing the alternatives for the first time and only thought
>>> about it for a few seconds. (Because the data is now mixed
>>> together, I have the worst of both worlds.)
>>> 
>>> The survey was further polluted because not only did the link
>>> escape (I'll accept that's my fault for not explicitly asking not
>>> to, lesson learned), but because Alex' blog entry restated the
>>> questions in his own words!  So not everyone was even voting on the
>>> same thing.  I suspect most people here read my guidelines and
>>> thought about it a bit before they voted.  Most of the people who
>>> discovered the poll via twitter didn't even see those guidelines.
>>> 
>>>> So we might as well talk about this now.
>>> 
>>> You can, but I am still asking that you not.
>>> 
>>> But here's something we can talk about: is it even practical to
>>> take a poll of this group?  I am more than willing to repost the
>>> poll, but I want data on what *this* group thinks, and that won't
>>> happen if the poll is reposted elsewhere with someone else's
>>> paraphrasing of what the instructions were.  (I can post polls on
>>> twitter too, and I might do that some day, but that's not what I
>>> want now.)
>> 
>>