On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 1:52 PM, Brent Yorgey
Hi all,
This fall I'll be teaching a half-credit introduction to Haskell to some undergrads. As a final project I am thinking of giving them the option of (instead of developing some program/project of their own) contributing to an existing open-source Haskell project. Of course, this requires the existence of projects they could contribute to. I'm sure they exist, but need your help to figure out what they are. So, do you maintain, or know of, any projects with the following characteristics?
* might conceivably be interesting to undergraduate CS majors
* simple enough that someone could make some non-trivial contributions in the space of 3 or 4 weeks
As interim maintainer of Takusen, I'll vouch for it and say that it would be open and welcoming to such students. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it qualifies as simple. It uses a lot of FFI and functional dependencies. Otherwise, I think it would be simple enough. Perhaps with a bit of negotiation we could find suitable tasks. One thing that was proposed for Takusen is to build compatibility layers for other Haskell database libraries, such as HDBC. This may actually be a decent project for a student and would possibly free them from the FFI and FDs bits of takusen. The takusen project page is here: http://projects.haskell.org/takusen/ Another idea someone had for takusen was to make a type safe query builder. Right now Takusen itself only requires that the "query" can be converted to string. So in principle, we could add data types / combinators for building SQL expressions and then have a QueryBuilder -> String function. Have you spoken to any other instructors that have used open source contributions as part of a course? I know that at Oregon State University, Dr. Budd has been teaching a class about open source (and how to get started) for several years. I'm sure he'd love to give you advice and he's very friendly. Here is a webpage with contact info: http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/research/members/budd/index.html For the students that do want to contribute to open source, you might encourage them to read Karl Fogel's, "Producing Open Source Software": http://producingoss.com/en/index.html
* could use some help!
At one point I was putting together a series of example OpenGL programs in Haskell. It's bitrotted these days and I'm not sure it needs updated to work with newer versions of HOpenGL. Interested students could polish it up and add more examples to it. I was translating examples from other languages, but creative students could invent their own examples. And, as I'm sure Don Stewart will point out, there is the Haskell reddit list of projects, although possibly too ambitious for 3-4 weeks: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell_proposals/top/?t=year The Date/Time api might be a good one from that list while running haskell code under google's native client is probably a bit too much to ask for :) I hope that helps, Jason