Re: [Haskell-cafe] Open-source projects for beginning Haskell students?

The problem with all of these suggestions is that they start from no code. I believe Brent is looking for an *existing* project which needs contributions. I assume so that beginning Haskellers can learn real code style in the middle to large, and get input from existing community members. Kris On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:59 PM, Vo Minh Thu wrote:

2013/3/11 Brent Yorgey :

...

Hi everyone,

I am currently teaching a half-credit introductory Haskell class for undergraduates. This is the third time I've taught it. Both of the previous times, for their final project I gave them the option of contributing to an open-source project; a couple groups/individuals took me up on it and I think it ended up being a modest success.

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".

If you have any such projects, I'd love to hear about it! Just send me a paragraph or so describing your project and explaining what task(s) you could use help with --- something that I could put on the course website for students to look at.

Here are a few more details:

* The students will be working on the projects from approximately the end of this month through the end of April. During the next two weeks they would be contacting you to discuss the possibility of working on your project.

* By "relative beginner" I mean someone familiar with the material listed here: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/lectures.html and just trying to come to terms with Applicative and Monad. They definitely do not know much if anything about optimization/profiling, GADTs, the mtl, or Haskell-programming-in-the-large. (Although part of the point of the project is to teach them a bit about programming-in-the-(medium/large)).

* What I would hope from you is a willingness to exchange email and/or chat with the student(s) over the course of the project, to give them a bit of guidance/mentoring. I am certainly willing to help on that front, but of course I probably don't know much about your particular project.

Maybe it is a too small project (and not a contribution to an existing project), but a Haskell wrapper around PostgreSQL setproctitle code would be nice (something similar exists in the Python world).

Otherwise I have began some "infrastructure" projects on GitHub that are all pretty simple but could be damn useful: curved is meant to be a drop-in-replacement for graphite (it is almost the case), sentry is a process-monitoring tool, humming is a job queue on top of PostgreSQL, hlinode is a binding to the Linode API, ... They all have in common that they are small, self-contained, and quite often just massaging around rawSystem calls, database "execute" calls, or GET/POST calls.

Thu

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