Add 2021 Community Survey Results Blog

[rylev]

This adds a high-level analysis of the results of the 2021 Community Survey.

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[flip1995]

Some typos I found.

I wonder about the survivor-ship bias of this survey. Do we have numbers for people who used Rust before but stopped using it (and the answers they gave)?

[rylev]

@flip1995 survivorship bias is likely going to impact our results somewhat. Unfortunately, we don't have good data on how former users would answer some of these questions (we need to revisit what we ask former users for future surveys). Also, those who are former users who answered the survey are unlikely to be representative of all former users. That being said 75% of former users said that they answered the survey because they anticipate using Rust again in the future which I guess can provide some evidence that if you stop using the language, it's unlikely because you hated it. 🤷‍♀️

I think the best way to address this is to just bring more people's attention to it - perhaps by saying something about taking the numbers with a bit of a grain of salt. On the other hand, this is a casual blog post and doesn't claim to be a rigorous statistical study, so maybe that would be overkill. I'm not sure.

[flip1995]

Thanks for the further insights!

That being said 75% of former users said that they answered the survey because they anticipate using Rust again in the future

That's good to hear! Probably doesn't reflect the stopped-using-Rust group of people completely though.

I think this is something to look into further this year. I try to think about possible ways to approach this until the next survey comes up :)

perhaps by saying something about taking the numbers with a bit of a grain of salt. On the other hand, this is a casual blog post and doesn't claim to be a rigorous statistical study

Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily mention it in the blog post. This was just a thought that came up when looking at those to-good-to-be-true numbers 😄

[steveklabnik]

One thing that isn't in this post this year, but has always been helpful to talk about, is usage of nightly vs latest stable vs other versions. I don't know if we have that data or analyzed it, but it's in my top two or three things I am curious about from the survey.

Otherwise, great post! this is a tremendous amount of work, but is so useful. Thank you 🙏

[nrc]

One thing that isn't in this post this year, but has always been helpful to talk about, is usage of nightly vs latest stable vs other versions. I don't know if we have that data or analyzed it, but it's in my top two or three things I am curious about from the survey.

That was intentional. We'll have a complete summary for the teams at least (and which I would like to make public too) which will include that data and other details. For the blog post we thought that the stable vs nightly split (and perceptions of stability, etc) were not as interesting to most users as they were a few years ago.

[Mark-Simulacrum]

Looks great! I left a couple comments that seem good to resolve, but then let's set the date for either today or Monday to merge this.

[rylev]

@Mark-Simulacrum @nrc I've addressed the feedback and adjusted the date to tomorrow (2022-02-15). Any remaining blockers?

[nikomatsakis]

Thanks for this! Nice easy read, clear narrative. Left one nit.

[joshtriplett]

The "rendered" link currently 404s.

[rylev]

The "rendered" link currently 404s.

Fixed!

Fixed

[steveklabnik]

@nrc very disappointing :(