TL;DR You’ll find the survey here.

It’s been a while since the first and only “State of CIDER” survey.1 Right after it happened in the end of 2019, the world went to shit and I kind of forgot about my intent to do the survey annually. 5 years later, it’s high time we get back on track!

CIDER has changed a lot in the past 5 years. nREPL has changed a lot. The development tooling Clojure ecosystem has changed a lot. Even Emacs has changed a lot. I’m guessing your usage of CIDER has changed a lot as well. If you’re still using Clojure and CIDER today, that is…

You can find the new survey here. We’ve made several updates to the questions - most notably there’s now a question about how frequently are you using certain CIDER features.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately that perhaps we went overboard with the feature-set in CIDER and that it might be prudent to trim the fat in CIDER 2.0, but we need data, so we can accurately know what’s being used and what’s not. I’ve also been thinking that mentioning many of the less known features in the survey might provoke some people to try them out. We’ll see.

There are other important questions that I like to get answers for, e.g.:

  • Can we drop support for Emacs 26 (and maybe even Emacs 27)?
  • Can we drop support for Java 8?2
  • Do people think that CIDER improved in the last year?
  • How often are people upgrading their CIDER installation?
  • What problems are users encountering? What would they like to see added/changed/improved?
  • Are people willing to support the project in one way or another?3
  • Is Figwheel still a thing in ClojureScript?

Your responses will also be instrumental in shaping up the roadmap for CIDER 2.0.

Last time around we got 545 responses and I hope this time around we’ll do a bit better, as more responses mean that the data we got is more accurate. The new survey is off to a pretty slow start - less than 200 responses in the first week. It will likely stay open till the end of January, so I hope we are going to get 500+ responses in total this around time as well.

Thanks for taking the time to fill in the survey! This means a lot to me and our team! I’d really appreciate it if you shared the survey on your social media profiles, so more people see it and take part in it. Let’s make CIDER better together!

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

  1. https://metaredux.com/posts/2019/11/02/state-of-cider.html ↩

  2. Who am I kidding here… I’m well aware we’ll be stuck supporting it for all eternity… ↩

  3. The financial support the project has received eroded quite a lot in the last couple of years, which was somewhat disappointing given all the work that went into CIDER and its ecosystem. ↩