There's been a growing backlash in certain circles to surveys like the State of JavaScript. I don't fully agree with the underlying rhetoric, and I do think that these surveys are both well-meaning and genuinely useful, if taken in context. Could they be more representative of the web? Sure, absolutely; but there will always be a reach issue, and some data is better than none.

Zach's (stealthy) entry on the topic feels like a much more valid critique. Rather than focusing on whether surveys like SoJS do enough to broaden their demographics, perhaps a better question is how useful they are for determining talking points about web culture more broadly. I often see stats from places like SoJS used to validate business decisions (the typical "we're using React because it's the most popular, see 👇") but Zach's points are more nuanced: by focusing on "JavaScript developers", these results ignore the vast majority of actual web work. In an industry still grappling with the Great Divide, is the divide a necessary evil, or something that is almost self-prophesied (an ouroboros style for loop, perhaps 😂)? I'm not sure, but Zach's words have definitely given me pause to think 🤔

On the falsehoods of considering the web (as a whole) through the lens of the State of JS survey:

This JavaScript community (if judged by the demographics of this survey) seems to be comprised mostly of folks that are largely building with React, webpack, and Jest. With React on 3.2% of web sites and jQuery at 77.7% (as of January 2023), that’s a pretty small slice of a much larger community.

On the Great Divide:

The question I keep asking though: is the divide borne from a healthy specialization of skills or a symptom of unnecessary tooling complexity?