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ocramz•

Cool ! But um, do you mind getting grilled on the math a little ? :)

turned discrete values into a continuous scale.

So you cast integers to floats or what else?

Each response was then given a value from -1 to 1.

One usually "whitens" data to achieve 0 mean and unit variance at this stage ..

I then picked a set of questions I thought covered a good cross-section of opinions and performed a Principal Component Analysis. This created a series of eigenvectors which reduced the dimensionality of the data to 8.

So you picked the first 8 eigenvectors, as sorted by eigenvalue magnitude, or just 8 questions out of the FPComplete questionnaire?

Reproducibility is important ;)

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rick_dz•

Always appreciate getting grilled on the math. I've got no formal math study under my belt so might make some mistakes from time to time.

In terms of discrete -> continuous. What I mean is turning a "Strongly agree" into a 1 and a "Strongly disagree" to a -1. Some people would argue that they do not form a continuous scale - but for the purposes of my analysis it made sense.

If I did it again I would probably do 0-1 instead of -1-1. Not really sure why that seemed like a good idea at the time.

And yes, I did pick the 8 eigenvectors sorted by eigenvalue magnitude. However I ran PCA on a subset of the questions in survey. Regrettably I didn't save any of my work. I'd quickly punched it out between other work I was doing and it didn't even occur to me that I'd want to do more analysis.

I've been meaning to write more about the Haskell user experience and about the survey I did last year. But other work commitments have been taking over. I hadn't expected to see my article posted on Reddit but appreciate you giving me your thoughts.

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rpglover64•

I'm half-waiting for a "Take this quiz to find out what sort of Haskell user you are" to appear in the near future.

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c_wraith•

I think this works if you treat these as a basis for the space of haskell users. None of them describe me, but a linear combination of them does..

Is that the intention for how these map to individuals?

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rick_dz•

They represent a lens through which we can view the Haskell community. So they're less about describing individual people and more about describing different ways of thinking. The things you want from Haskell features or documentation seem to differ depending on what type of work you are doing.

I guess it makes sense that some linear combination of these represents each person. Especially considering the PCA method that most of the personas were driven from. All the eigenvectors together account for the full spread of attitudes across the survey. It's not likely that many people fall strictly in one eigenvector. Instead these particular groupings account for the biggest spread of attitudes.

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meekale•

I'm always really interested to see what happens when the theorists apply their talents of formalization to the domains of the other users...

The fundamental abstractions and tools seem more obviously justifies by theory, but as you get further out into system integration and domain logic, code tends to become less and less sensible.

In my utopia, there is an independent university where theorists work alongside open source developers of practical software...

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coslic2•

My utopia is similar with yours, in the sense that I dream of a world where theory will make its way into practice and the distinction is not so much clear between theory and practice. Also, much of the problems in the real world can be abstracted and put in a more general framework, where a lot of theory can help to solve the problems in hands more conceptually and efficiently. But for that, the theorist must not view the practician as a lower professional, and the practician must not view the theorist as an ivory tower scientist. As a powerful example, the calculus developed by Newton and Leibniz is so useful in today physics, that to say theory and practice are divorced in other sciences is rather a proof of high ignorance. My personal opinion is computing science will become like calculus in this century, but people must change a little the paradigm theorist / practician. (As an aside, the theorist and the practician are working with real problems, not imaginary ones! The scale on which the theorist methods can be applied is, potentially, large, but for that we must learn and educate ourselves in a more rigorous and formal way of thinking. It's not easy, but is more reliable than the so-called intuitive way).

P.S.: sorry for the eventual english mistakes, I'm not a native english speaker.

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