Re: [vhdl-200x] Marketing Surveys are prohibited by IEEE

On 27/04/2011 00:29, Bailey, Stephen wrote:
> Evan, you are just being insulting now. How can you make such
> accusations without having no information on the methodology used?

Well, it certainly wasn't intended to be insulting; my apologies to
anyone who was offended. In answer to your question, my comments were
made precisely because the data was presented without any information on
the methodology.

One of the things I actually get paid for is data analysis, and I spend
a fair amount of time separating "fact" from "statistics". I am fully
prepared to accept that Mentor has no axe to grind, and has done the
rest of us a service by sharing the results of this survey, but that
doesn't mean that the results can be taken at face value, any more than
for any other data collection exercise.

Dennis has posted an interesting link. I haven't had the time to look at
this in detail, but the first thing that's obvious, and important, is
that 47% of the respondents described themselves as "non-FPGA
verification engineers", and 14% as "FPGA verification engineers". It
seems to me that this might conceivably seriously skew any
interpretation of overall language usage.

I couldn't actually find your data in the blog posts - have I missed
something? As far as I can make out, Harry Foster hasn't yet published
the language statistics, and the figures you gave are from Wally Rhines'
DVCON chart, which you've described as "languages used in verification".
You do also say, for VHDL, "16% projected this year", but it wasn't
obvious to me that all the other figures on the right, which I'd taken
to be current usage, are actually (according to the chart) "next 12
months" projections.

It'll be interesting to get Harry's take on the figures when he's done.
Meanwhile, I'd still like to find out how 16% of respondents claimed to
be using SystemC as a "verification language"; why I've never met any of
these people; why 8% of verification engineers are still using Vera; why
I don't know anyone who's still using Vera and why I haven't seen any
Vera job postings for years; what actually qualifies as "SystemVerilog"
usage; where the "next 12 months" projections come from; and so on.

-Evan

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