Re: [Haskell-cafe] Parsec community and up-to-date documentation

* Konstantine Rybnikov [2013-03-25 11:22:21+0200]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Roman Cheplyaka wrote:

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* Konstantine Rybnikov [2013-03-25 00:19:04+0200]

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Hi!

I've been busy with (trying to) learning/using parsec lately and as a beginner had a lot of headache starting from outdated documentation in various places, lack of more tutorials, confusion between Text.Parsec and Text.ParseCombinator modules and so on.

While I solved most of my problems via googling / reading stackoverflow / reading source code (of outdated version first, btw, the one I got from Daan's homepage :), I still had a feeling all the time that I'm doing something wrong and that I can't find place where "party is going on".

So I wondered, what can I do to create a community around Parsec, to get issue tracking, pull-requests, up-to-date comprehensive documentation and tutorials etc.? Parsec seems like a perfect candidate for something like this.

A couple of years ago I decided to do pretty much this — create up-to-date comprehensive documentation for Parsec. Unfortunately, the project turned out too ambitious for me at the time. The only part of it that I've finished is published as this SO answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/6040237/110081

Of course, SO answers are not a substitute for good documentation, but they are a good way to start, and you can later merge those answers into something more coherent. So this is one way you approach it — just publish the knowledge you've acquired as self-answered questions on SO.

Roman

Thanks, Roman. I've totally read this answer some time yesterday (too late, unfortunately). You also seemed (due to logs) to implement functionality I needed (lookAhead, if I'm not mistaken). Thanks!

But I just don't understand why such a basic thing as live community-hub for a project (github page would be enough for this) is so hard to create. I'm also not saying I would write a lot of docs, but at least making them more "up to date" doesn't look as too ambitious task.

It's not hard to create — it's hard to get traction. Anyway, don't be discouraged by my experience. Go for it! I put back my original repo at https://github.com/feuerbach/parsec-doc — feel free to use it. In particular, it contains an interesting analysis of parsec usage by Dmitry Astapov. Roman