Perl Editor and IDE Poll results

A few days ago I announced a quick poll to find out what editor or IDE people are using when writing Perl code. The poll is now closed. There were 3,234 answers but as multiple answers were allowed the number of people is lower.

The data of the poll can be found under Perl IDE and Editor Poll, October 2009 on the Perl IDE web site along with the raw CSV files. It does not allow deep analysis so just a few quick observations.

The traditional Unix editors (vi/vim/gvim and emacs) got almost 50% of the answers. Taking into account that the number of people who answered is probably considerably lower than the number of answers this means a lot more than 50% of the responding people use either of those editors. For example I marked Padre and vim and I know I was not alone with this.

On the other hand I assume - without any proof - that vim and emacs use is much higher in the core Perl community than among people writing Perl in companies without a connection to the community. As quite likely more "community people" answered the poll than "non-community people" this skews the data in favor of vim/emacs.

I was surprised to see Padre getting 101 votes. I did not think so many people already use Padre.

Padre got more or less the same number of "votes" as TextMate and Komodo Edit which probably means that for all the other editors only a small fraction of the users voted while for Padre every one of its users voted. I don't think that 3% of the people writing Perl are using Padre. I don't think 3% even heard of it.

Anyway, some more thought is required on how to understand this data.