Subj : Re: year 11 maths survey
To   : comp.programming
From : Richard Heathfield
Date : Sat Sep 10 2005 04:41 am

Nixon said:

> here is the link http://www.geocities.com/mathssurvey/survey.html

There are a few problems with your survey.

The first serious difficulty is with question 4. If a person knows 10 
languages, does he click "5-10" or "10+"? Both fit.

Question 5 has some more problems. For one thing, C and C++ are two very 
different languages, and should not be lumped together. Knowledge of one 
does not necessarily mean knowledge of the other. Secondly, you've included 
some very old languages which are likely to have few followers nowadays 
(e.g. Algol, Modula, BCPL) and missed out some fairly popular ones (APL, 
Perl, C#). Oh, and you misspelt "COBOL", but I don't suppose anybody will 
mind too much about that!

Question 6 suffers from the same problem as Question 4.

Question 7 gave me pause for thought. In 1982, programming hadn't yet made 
it onto the school curriculum. The Internet might just about be said to 
exist at that time, but few had heard of it then, and the Web wasn't even a 
twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye yet. Programming books undoubtedly 
existed, but were hard to get hold of. Since I wasn't taught by anyone (I 
learned by hacking around in BASIC on a mainframe terminal), and since I 
didn't know of anyone else's code, and since you have no edit-field for 
"other", I literally don't know what to tick.

Question 8 assumes that respondents only use one computer. Many 
professionals - and indeed many hobbyists - will own more than one, and put 
them to good use. Also, you fail to distinguish between someone who puts 
"high end" because he's using the 48KB RAM pack on the Speccy, and someone 
who puts "low end" because his Cray supercomputer doesn't pack quite as 
much power as the one down the hall.

Question 9 is a tricky one. I use Linux, Windows, MS-DOS, and occasionally 
OS390. But yes, I could squeeze all those into that edit box if I had to.

Since I couldn't be sure of answering some of the questions in the manner 
you intended, I decided not to submit my response.


-- 
Richard Heathfield
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29/7/2005
http://www.cpax.org.uk
email: rjh at above domain

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