Developer Survey

[MylesBorins]

We've been making a bunch of claims regarding what "developers would want". While I think we all have quite a great intuition on this, perhaps we can do a developer survey to prove out some of our hypotheses before digging too far into a philosophical debate.

@nodejs/user-feedback can maybe help?

[mhdawson]

I think a survey would be a good way to get broader input. I think this group (the modules wg) would need to put together the initial list of questions to be asked and then the user-feedback team can work with the Greg at the foundation to tweak and then have the survey run.

[mhdawson]

As an example, its good that the questions be closed whenever possible.

How important is interop between CJS and EJS to you:

1 - not at all
2 - small benefit
3 - nice to have
4 - important
5 - top priority

[ljharb]

For that specific question (and probably many others), we should also separately ask how important that feature is to be available by default versus "by a loader" versus "not at all"

[jkrems]

"by a loader"

nit: How about "enabled by default" vs. "possible" or "opt-in"? Mostly because loader might be hard to understand for people / might imply too much.

[bmeck]

I think we need to be sure that we encapsulate the questions so that we are clearly trying to get either the expectation of how ESM would be implemented, or the opinion of if a feature is important. I think it is very easy to be unclear on the difference of these. Expectations can lead to opinions of if a feature is important, but they are not necessarily the same thing. You can have a neutral opinion while having a strong expectation of how things should work.

Defining what interop is is a complex task for example. Consider the following points and how detailed I think we need to be in order to start to expose this difference:

• how important is it to be able to load ESM from CJS
• would you expect to be able to use import(ESM) to load ESM from CJS
• would you expect to be able to use require(ESM) to load ESM from CJS
• how important is it require(ESM) is synchronous and does not return a Promise

Even after all of this, we might have comflicts with implementing some features such as synchronously returning a module namespace from require. These questions are used as guides for what users are thinking, and we need to be clear about if they are thinking in terms of expectation and if they are thinking in terms of opinions of a feature's value.

[bmeck]

Oh, and we should probably figure out what questions each feature needs so maybe that is a good place to maybe start making a list of questions and combining similar ones as we go along? Does that seem a good idea to others?

[mhdawson]

@bmeck sounds reasonable to me.

[inidaname]

@bmeck I +1, also I will suggest we use the Google Doc from #55 as a guide for generating a more kind of specific questions.