Well, now that we've started this discussion I presume it's okay if I
ask a few things. I don't know if these are good ideas, but I thought
I'd throw them out.
Basically, I am a student and would be eligible for the SoC.
I'd like to work on something related to numerics support or
performance in Haskell. Either building on existing gsl bindings,
making something out of whole cloth, or spending some intensive work
on compiler optimizations.
My dream would be to build up enough monte carlo
support in haskell that things like high energy physics event
simulators could be coded in the language without sacrificing too much
performance and having a hundred times the flexibility and
*maintainability*.
Creighton Hogg
On 4/22/06, Paolo Martini
Hello everybody, nice to meet you all.
Last year I did work on an Haskell project during the first year of the Google Summer of Code programme[1]. I wrote the bindings to the Cairo Vector Graphics library and integrated them in Gtk2Hs. You can see last year's announcement on the website[2].
I had to take Google itself as my mentoring organization, in absence of a better-suited one, no wonder I was the only one with an Haskell project, eventually I got one of its 13 slots available -- Chris DiBona[3], the project leader, seem to like Haskell very much!
They recently announced they would be running the programme again this year, and I thought we could surely do better! My idea is that the best way we are going to get more Haskell projects done is having Haskell.org as a mentoring organization this year.
Let me briefly summarize how the project works; it starts with a number of mentoring organizations that support active open source projects. They are required to publish a list of projects for students to apply for, and some mentors which will take care of the pupils during their work. Part of the fun is of course that the students can propose their own projects too. Each successful applicant gets an initial $500, three months of coding time, a mid- term $2,000 of are doing well and a final $2,000 on successful completion of the project (The site[4] does explain it all.)
I contacted many of the people who usually reside in the #haskell IRC channel asking for collaboration, and they promptly accepted, forming a quite big number of well organized people -- as now, those three people are in charge for the administrative work:
- Isaac Jones http://www.syntaxpolice.org/, - Donald Bruce Steward http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/, - David Himmelstrup http://darcs.haskell.org/~lemmih/aboutMe.html.
Not surprisingly, since the people of the channel are known to be very kind and helpful, answering questions at every time of the day, I've got a good number of volunteers for mentoring too (which I'm very happy about):
- David Himmelstrup, - John Goerzen http://www.complete.org/, - Cale Gibbard http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/CaleGibbard, - Einar Karttunen http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ekarttun/, - Shae Matijs Erisson http://www.ScannedInAvian.com/, - Duncan Coutts http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/development/. - Andres L\¨oh http://www.iai.uni-bonn.de/~loeh, - Ian Lynagh http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/ian.lynagh/,
And the list is getting bigger and bigger!
Unsure about where to get an "authoritative answer" about things like this I have mailed Simon Peyton-Jones, he likes the idea (Thanks very much!) He explained to me that since the Haskell community is very decentralized I would better send a message to the Haskell mailing list to propose this project.
I hope you will be as enthusisatic as I am. Hacking Haskell code during the summer, funded enough to keep up with the other things (and getting some pretty cool hardware lately), was a *great* experience.
I sincerely hope that many students will apply for Haskell works. We need projects done! I'll be mailing you the url of the wikipage collecting projects and details.
Thank you very much, Paolo. --
[1] http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html [2] http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/?p=30 [3] http://dibona.com
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