On 13-03-11 10:52 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
On 03/11/2013 11:48 AM, Brent Yorgey wrote:
So I'd like to do it again this time around, and am looking for particular projects I can suggest to them. Do you have an open-source project with a few well-specified tasks that a relative beginner (see below) could reasonably make a contribution towards in the space of about four weeks? I'm aware that most tasks don't fit that profile, but even complex projects usually have a few "simple-ish" tasks that haven't yet been done just because "no one has gotten around to it yet".
It's not exciting, but adding doctest suites with examples to existing packages would be a great help.
* Good return on investment.
* Not too hard.
* The project is complete when you stop typing.
In the similar spirit, many existing projects would benefit from a benchmark suite. It's a fairly simple but somewhat tedious process, good for a team work practice: 1. Take a well-defined task, like parsing JSON for example. 2. Devise a test scenario that includes the task. 3. Make a list of all libraries on Hackage which (claim to) do the task. 4. Write a simple test for each of the libraries. 5. Combine all the tests into a Criterion test suite. 6. Publish the test suite and the benchmark results.