FAQ

The Perl Survey was run from July to September 2007, and attempted to answer questions like:

• Where do Perl programmers come from?
• What sort of fields do they work in?
• What languages — computer and spoken — do Perl programmers use?
• How many use Perl as their primary language?
• What proportion of Perl users participate in the Perl community through mailing lists,
user groups, and conferences?
• What platforms is Perl used on?

The Perl Survey is a non-commercial, community-based effort, and these results are being
published freely for the benefit of the Perl community. Full exports of the survey’s data are
also available under a Creative Commons license.

The survey was performed online, via this website.
Michael Schwern launched the survey during his lightning talk at OSCON on July 26th, 2007. News of the survey was also posted by Best Web Gallery to as many Perl mailing lists and websites as possible, it was promoted at various community events, and participants were encouraged to spread the word to any other Perl programmers they knew.

One goal of the survey was to reach groups of Perl users whose voices aren’t usually heard; to that end, we sought translations of the survey questions and invitations to participate into various languages. We also promoted the survey to groups at the periphery of the Perl community, such as system administrators, users of other scripting
languages, and so forth. A Google AdWords campaign was also undertaken in the hopes of reaching people who might not otherwise have heard of the survey.

Participants were required to sign up with an email address and respond to a confirmation email before taking the survey. This measure was taken to limit the attractiveness of “ballot stuffing”, a technique known to be used in the Perl community in cases where surveys or polls are completely unprotected against repeat submissions.

Participants were advised that the full data set would be made available online, and that in some cases it would be possible to determine an individual respondent’s identity based on the data available. For this reason, the most personal question (about income) was made optional. However, if anyone was uncomfortable sharing the other information sought in the survey, they were advised not to participate.