content/survey2017-results.article - blog - Git at Google

 Go 2017 Survey Results
 26 Feb 2018
 Tags: survey, community

 Steve Francia
 spf@golang.org

 * Thank you

 This post summarizes the result of our 2017 user survey along with commentary
 and insights. It also draws key comparisons between the results of the 2016 and
 2017 survey.

 This year we had 6,173 survey respondents, 70% more than the 3,595 we had in the
 [[https://blog.golang.org/survey2016-results][Go 2016 User Survey]]. In
 addition, it also had a slightly higher completion rate (84% → 87%) and a
 higher response rate to most of the questions. We believe that survey length is
 the main cause of this improvement as the 2017 survey was shortened in response
 to feedback that the 2016 survey was too long.

 We are grateful to everyone who provided their feedback through the survey to
 help shape the future of Go.

 * Programming background

 For the first time, more survey respondents say they are paid to write Go
 than say they write it outside work. This indicates a significant shift in
 Go's user base and in its acceptance by companies for professional software
 development.

 The areas people who responded to the survey work in is mostly consistent with
 last year, however, mobile and desktop applications have fallen significantly.

 Another important shift: the #1 use of Go is now writing API/RPC services (65%,
 up 5% over 2016), taking over the top spot from writing CLI tools in Go (63%).
 Both take full advantage of Go's distinguishing features and are key elements of
 modern cloud computing. As more companies adopt Go, we expect these two uses
 of Go to continue to thrive.

 Most of the metrics reaffirm things we have learned in prior years. Go
 programmers still overwhelmingly prefer Go. As more time passes Go users are
 deepening their experience in Go. While Go has increased its lead among Go
 developers, the order of language rankings remains quite consistent with last
 year.

 .html survey2017/background.html

 * Go usage

 In nearly every question around the usage and perception of Go, Go has
 demonstrated improvement over our prior survey. Users are happier using Go, and
 a greater percentage prefer using Go for their next project.

 When asked about the biggest challenges to their own personal use of Go, users
 clearly conveyed that lack of dependency management and lack of generics were
 their two biggest issues, consistent with 2016. In 2017 we laid a foundation to
 be able to address these issues. We improved our proposal and development
 process with the addition of
 [[https://golang.org/wiki/ExperienceReports][Experience Reports]] which is
 enabling the project to gather and obtain feedback critical to making these
 significant changes. We also made
 [[https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#build][sigificant changes]] under the hood in
 how Go obtains, and builds packages. This is foundational work essential to
 addressing our dependency management needs.

 These two issues will continue to be a major focus of the project through 2018.

 In this section we asked two new questions. Both center around what
 developers are doing with Go in a more granular way than we've previously asked.
 We hope this data will provide insights for the Go project and ecosystem.

 Since last year there has been an increase of the percentage of people who
 identified "Go lacks critical features" as the reason they don't use Go more and
 a decreased percentage who identified "Go not being an appropriate fit". Other
 than these changes, the list remains consistent with last year.


 .html survey2017/usage.html

 * Development and deployment

 We asked programmers which operating systems they develop Go on; the ratios of
 their responses remain consistent with last year. 64% of respondents say
 they use Linux, 49% use MacOS, and 18% use Windows, with multiple choices
 allowed.

 Continuing its explosive growth, VSCode is now the most popular editor among
 Gophers. IntelliJ/GoLand also saw significant increase in usage. These largely
 came at the expense of Atom and Submlime Text which saw relative usage drops.
 This question had a 6% higher response rate from last year.

 Survey respondents demonstrated significantly higher satisfaction with Go
 support in their editors over 2016 with the ratio of satisfied to dissatisfied
 doubling (9:1 → 18:1). Thank you to everyone who worked on Go editor support
 for all your hard work.

 Go deployment is roughly evenly split between privately managed servers and
 hosted cloud servers. For Go applications, Google Cloud services saw significant
 increase over 2016. For Non-Go applications, AWS Lambda saw the largest increase in use.

 .html survey2017/dev.html

 * Working Effectively

 We asked how strongly people agreed or disagreed with various statements about
 Go. All questions are repeated from last year with the addition of one new
 question which we introduced to add further clarifaction around how users are
 able to both find and *use* Go libraries.

 All responses either indicated a small improvement or are comparable to 2016.

 As in 2016, the most commonly requested missing library for Go is one for
 writing GUIs though the demand is not as pronounced as last year. No other
 missing library registered a significant number of responses.

 The primary sources for finding answers to Go questions are the Go web site,
 Stack Overflow, and reading source code directly. Stack Overflow showed a small
 increase from usage over last year.

 The primary sources for Go news are still the Go blog, Reddit’s /r/golang and
 Twitter; like last year, there may be some bias here since these are also how
 the survey was announced.

 .html survey2017/effective.html

 * The Go Project

 59% of respondents expressed interest in contributing in some way to the Go
 community and projects, up from 55% last year. Respondents also indicated that
 they felt much more welcome to contribute than in 2016. Unfortunately,
 respondents indicated only a very tiny improvement in understanding how to
 contribute. We will be actively working with the community and its leaders
 to make this a more accessible process.

 Respondents showed an increase in agreement that they are confident in the
 leadership of the Go project (9:1 → 11:1). They also showed a small increase in
 agreement that the project leadership understands their needs (2.6:1 → 2.8:1)
 and in agreement that they feel comfortable approaching project leadership with
 questions and feedback (2.2:1 → 2.4:1). While improvements were made, this
 continues to be an area of focus for the project and its leadership going
 forward. We will continue to work to improve our understanding of user needs and
 approachability.

 We tried some [[https://blog.golang.org/8years#TOC_1.3.][new ways]] to engage
 with users in 2017 and while progress was made, we are still working on making these
 solutions scalable for our growing community.

 .html survey2017/project.html

 * Community

 At the end of the survey, we asked some demographic questions.

 The country distribution of responses is largely similar to last year with minor
 fluctuations. Like last year, the distribution of countries is similar to the
 visits to golang.org, though some Asian countries remain under-represented in
 the survey.

 Perhaps the most significant improvement over 2016 came from the question which
 asked to what degree do respondents agreed with the statement, "I feel welcome
 in the Go community". Last year the agreement to disagreement ratio was 15:1. In
 2017 this ratio nearly doubled to 25:1.

 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 underrepresented groups. We had a 4% increase in
 response rate over last year. The percentage of each underrepresented group
 increased over 2016, some quite significantly.

 Like last year, we took the results of the statement “I feel welcome in the Go
 community” and broke them down by responses to the various underrepresented
 categories. Like the whole, most of the respondents who identified as
 underrepresented also felt significantly more welcome in the Go community than
 in 2016. Respondents who identified as a woman showed the most significant
 improvement with an increase of over 400% in the ratio of agree:disagree to this
 statement (3:1 → 13:1). People who identified as ethnically or racially
 underrepresented had an increase of over 250% (7:1 → 18:1). Like last year,
 those who identified as not underrepresented still had a much higher percentage
 of agreement to this statement than those identifying from underrepresented
 groups.

 We are encouraged by this progress and hope that the momentum continues.

 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`, unchanged from last year.

 .html survey2017/community.html

 Finally, on behalf of the entire Go project, we are grateful for everyone who
 has contributed to our project, whether by being a part of our great community,
 by taking this survey or by taking an interest in Go.
	Go 2017 Survey Results
	26 Feb 2018
	Tags: survey, community

	Steve Francia
	spf@golang.org

	* Thank you

	This post summarizes the result of our 2017 user survey along with commentary
	and insights. It also draws key comparisons between the results of the 2016 and
	2017 survey.

	This year we had 6,173 survey respondents, 70% more than the 3,595 we had in the
	[[https://blog.golang.org/survey2016-results][Go 2016 User Survey]]. In
	addition, it also had a slightly higher completion rate (84% → 87%) and a
	higher response rate to most of the questions. We believe that survey length is
	the main cause of this improvement as the 2017 survey was shortened in response
	to feedback that the 2016 survey was too long.

	We are grateful to everyone who provided their feedback through the survey to
	help shape the future of Go.

	* Programming background

	For the first time, more survey respondents say they are paid to write Go
	than say they write it outside work. This indicates a significant shift in
	Go's user base and in its acceptance by companies for professional software
	development.

	The areas people who responded to the survey work in is mostly consistent with
	last year, however, mobile and desktop applications have fallen significantly.

	Another important shift: the #1 use of Go is now writing API/RPC services (65%,
	up 5% over 2016), taking over the top spot from writing CLI tools in Go (63%).
	Both take full advantage of Go's distinguishing features and are key elements of
	modern cloud computing. As more companies adopt Go, we expect these two uses
	of Go to continue to thrive.

	Most of the metrics reaffirm things we have learned in prior years. Go
	programmers still overwhelmingly prefer Go. As more time passes Go users are
	deepening their experience in Go. While Go has increased its lead among Go
	developers, the order of language rankings remains quite consistent with last
	year.

	.html survey2017/background.html

	* Go usage

	In nearly every question around the usage and perception of Go, Go has
	demonstrated improvement over our prior survey. Users are happier using Go, and
	a greater percentage prefer using Go for their next project.

	When asked about the biggest challenges to their own personal use of Go, users
	clearly conveyed that lack of dependency management and lack of generics were
	their two biggest issues, consistent with 2016. In 2017 we laid a foundation to
	be able to address these issues. We improved our proposal and development
	process with the addition of
	[[https://golang.org/wiki/ExperienceReports][Experience Reports]] which is
	enabling the project to gather and obtain feedback critical to making these
	significant changes. We also made
	[[https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#build][sigificant changes]] under the hood in
	how Go obtains, and builds packages. This is foundational work essential to
	addressing our dependency management needs.

	These two issues will continue to be a major focus of the project through 2018.

	In this section we asked two new questions. Both center around what
	developers are doing with Go in a more granular way than we've previously asked.
	We hope this data will provide insights for the Go project and ecosystem.

	Since last year there has been an increase of the percentage of people who
	identified "Go lacks critical features" as the reason they don't use Go more and
	a decreased percentage who identified "Go not being an appropriate fit". Other
	than these changes, the list remains consistent with last year.


	.html survey2017/usage.html

	* Development and deployment

	We asked programmers which operating systems they develop Go on; the ratios of
	their responses remain consistent with last year. 64% of respondents say
	they use Linux, 49% use MacOS, and 18% use Windows, with multiple choices
	allowed.

	Continuing its explosive growth, VSCode is now the most popular editor among
	Gophers. IntelliJ/GoLand also saw significant increase in usage. These largely
	came at the expense of Atom and Submlime Text which saw relative usage drops.
	This question had a 6% higher response rate from last year.

	Survey respondents demonstrated significantly higher satisfaction with Go
	support in their editors over 2016 with the ratio of satisfied to dissatisfied
	doubling (9:1 → 18:1). Thank you to everyone who worked on Go editor support
	for all your hard work.

	Go deployment is roughly evenly split between privately managed servers and
	hosted cloud servers. For Go applications, Google Cloud services saw significant
	increase over 2016. For Non-Go applications, AWS Lambda saw the largest increase in use.

	.html survey2017/dev.html

	* Working Effectively

	We asked how strongly people agreed or disagreed with various statements about
	Go. All questions are repeated from last year with the addition of one new
	question which we introduced to add further clarifaction around how users are
	able to both find and use Go libraries.

	All responses either indicated a small improvement or are comparable to 2016.

	As in 2016, the most commonly requested missing library for Go is one for
	writing GUIs though the demand is not as pronounced as last year. No other
	missing library registered a significant number of responses.

	The primary sources for finding answers to Go questions are the Go web site,
	Stack Overflow, and reading source code directly. Stack Overflow showed a small
	increase from usage over last year.

	The primary sources for Go news are still the Go blog, Reddit’s /r/golang and
	Twitter; like last year, there may be some bias here since these are also how
	the survey was announced.

	.html survey2017/effective.html

	* The Go Project

	59% of respondents expressed interest in contributing in some way to the Go
	community and projects, up from 55% last year. Respondents also indicated that
	they felt much more welcome to contribute than in 2016. Unfortunately,
	respondents indicated only a very tiny improvement in understanding how to
	contribute. We will be actively working with the community and its leaders
	to make this a more accessible process.

	Respondents showed an increase in agreement that they are confident in the
	leadership of the Go project (9:1 → 11:1). They also showed a small increase in
	agreement that the project leadership understands their needs (2.6:1 → 2.8:1)
	and in agreement that they feel comfortable approaching project leadership with
	questions and feedback (2.2:1 → 2.4:1). While improvements were made, this
	continues to be an area of focus for the project and its leadership going
	forward. We will continue to work to improve our understanding of user needs and
	approachability.

	We tried some [[https://blog.golang.org/8years#TOC_1.3.][new ways]] to engage
	with users in 2017 and while progress was made, we are still working on making these
	solutions scalable for our growing community.

	.html survey2017/project.html

	* Community

	At the end of the survey, we asked some demographic questions.

	The country distribution of responses is largely similar to last year with minor
	fluctuations. Like last year, the distribution of countries is similar to the
	visits to golang.org, though some Asian countries remain under-represented in
	the survey.

	Perhaps the most significant improvement over 2016 came from the question which
	asked to what degree do respondents agreed with the statement, "I feel welcome
	in the Go community". Last year the agreement to disagreement ratio was 15:1. In
	2017 this ratio nearly doubled to 25:1.

	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 underrepresented groups. We had a 4% increase in
	response rate over last year. The percentage of each underrepresented group
	increased over 2016, some quite significantly.

	Like last year, we took the results of the statement “I feel welcome in the Go
	community” and broke them down by responses to the various underrepresented
	categories. Like the whole, most of the respondents who identified as
	underrepresented also felt significantly more welcome in the Go community than
	in 2016. Respondents who identified as a woman showed the most significant
	improvement with an increase of over 400% in the ratio of agree:disagree to this
	statement (3:1 → 13:1). People who identified as ethnically or racially
	underrepresented had an increase of over 250% (7:1 → 18:1). Like last year,
	those who identified as not underrepresented still had a much higher percentage
	of agreement to this statement than those identifying from underrepresented
	groups.

	We are encouraged by this progress and hope that the momentum continues.

	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`, unchanged from last year.

	.html survey2017/community.html

	Finally, on behalf of the entire Go project, we are grateful for everyone who
	has contributed to our project, whether by being a part of our great community,
	by taking this survey or by taking an interest in Go.