It's not possible to sum them. See the explanation of how to read the data under the "What do you like about Go?" results. In particular, "management" and "dependency" both include the "dependency management" counts, so including those in the sum double-counts responses that say "dependency management".

I ran the numbers just now, and 571 responses contain the (case-insensitive) text substring "package manage" or "dependenc", compared to 623 for substring "generic". These two topics are very clearly the top two. They're also both on my list for this year (research.swtch.com/go2017). It doesn't seem that important which one "won".

If you have suggestions for how to summarize free-response text in a way that lets the data speak rather than lend itself to cherry-picking, please let us know. I'm certainly open to improved analysis next time.

generic = 1%

generics = 16%

so it's a good chunk of the people who answered the survey.

2% mention types and 1% type system so it might be possible these come from people dissatisfied with the type system.

Finally, it's not clear whether people who mentioned dependency management where also counted in dependency and management.

All we know is that "generics" was the word the came out the most often.

The interpretation of the open questions could definitely use some semantic analysis; I agree that it really does look like there's more frustration around packaging than generics, based on how they interpreted the results.