On Mar 11, 2013, at 11:26 AM, Jason Dagit wrote:

Myself and several of my friends would find it useful to have a plotting library that we can use from ghci to quickly/easily visualize data. Especially if that data is part of a simulation we are toying with. Therefore, this proposal is for: A gnuplot-, matlab- or plotinum-like plotting API (that uses diagrams as the backend?). The things to emphasize: * Easy to install: No gtk2hs requirement. Preferably just pure haskell code and similar for any dependencies. Must be cross platform. * Frontend: graphs should be easy to construct; customizability is not as important * Backend: options for generating static images are nice, but for the use case we have in mind also being able to render in a window from ghci is very valuable. (this could imply something as purely rendering to JuicyPixels and I could write the rendering code)

* 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.

I am willing/able to take on the mentoring aspect :)

i second this, but with a different emphasis. i would like a ggplot2-type DSL for generating graphs, for data analysis and exploration. i agree with : * it would be great to have no gtk2hs / cairo requirement. (i guess this means text rendering in the diagrams-svg backend needs to be solved.) i guess in the near-term, this is less important to me -- having a proper plotting DSL at all is an important start. * frontend : graphs should be easy to construct, but having some flexibility is important. the application here is being able to explore statistical data, with slicing, grouping, highlighting, faceting, etc. * backend : static images are enough for me, interactive is a plus. most importantly : it should be fast enough to work pleasantly with large datasets. ggplot2 is pretty awesome but kills my machine, routinely. i would be willing to mentor, but i'm not an expert enough i think! best, ben

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 1:09 PM, Brent Yorgey wrote:

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 11:50:38AM -0700, Ben wrote:

...

On Mar 11, 2013, at 11:26 AM, Jason Dagit wrote:

...

Myself and several of my friends would find it useful to have a

...

...

* Easy to install: No gtk2hs requirement. Preferably just pure haskell code and similar for any dependencies. Must be cross platform. * Frontend: graphs should be easy to construct; customizability is not as important * Backend: options for generating static images are nice, but for

...

...

* 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.

I am willing/able to take on the mentoring aspect :)

i second this, but with a different emphasis. i would like a ggplot2-type DSL for generating graphs, for data analysis and exploration. i agree with :

* it would be great to have no gtk2hs / cairo requirement. (i guess

plotting library that we can use from ghci to quickly/easily visualize data. Especially if that data is part of a simulation we are toying with. Therefore, this proposal is for: A gnuplot-, matlab- or plotinum-like plotting API (that uses diagrams as the backend?). The things to emphasize: the use case we have in mind also being able to render in a window from ghci is very valuable. (this could imply something as purely rendering to JuicyPixels and I could write the rendering code) this means text rendering in the diagrams-svg backend needs to be solved.) i guess in the near-term, this is less important to me -- having a proper plotting DSL at all is an important start.

...

* frontend : graphs should be easy to construct, but having some

flexibility is important. the application here is being able to explore statistical data, with slicing, grouping, highlighting, faceting, etc.

...

* backend : static images are enough for me, interactive is a plus.

most importantly : it should be fast enough to work pleasantly with large datasets. ggplot2 is pretty awesome but kills my machine, routinely.

Not to throw cold water on these ideas (which sound fantastic!), but the scope of this sounds more like a GSoC project than something a beginner could accomplish in 10-15 hours in the space of a few weeks. I'm looking not for project ideas but for small, concrete contributions they could make to existing open source projects.

Good point. Perhaps the project I mentioned could be broken up into suitable tasks? For example, if the students just worked on the frontend portion it would still be useful as a starting point for others. Jason

On 12 March 2013 22:46, Tim Docker wrote:

On 12/03/13 05:26, Jason Dagit wrote:

...

Myself and several of my friends would find it useful to have a plotting library that we can use from ghci to quickly/easily visualize data. Especially if that data is part of a simulation we are toying with. Therefore, this proposal is for: A gnuplot-, matlab- or plotinum-like plotting API (that uses diagrams as the backend?). The things to emphasize: * Easy to install: No gtk2hs requirement. Preferably just pure haskell code and similar for any dependencies. Must be cross platform. * Frontend: graphs should be easy to construct; customizability is not as important * Backend: options for generating static images are nice, but for the use case we have in mind also being able to render in a window from ghci is very valuable. (this could imply something as purely rendering to JuicyPixels and I could write the rendering code)

I maintain the Chart library:

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Chart

I'd like to see it used more widely, but gtk/cairo seems to be a problem for many people.

Is the cairo dependency the reason you are suggesting that an alternative plotting library be built? Is your problem with cairo the difficulty in setting it up on ms windows/osx? What graphics API would you suggest using to "render in a window from ghci"?

If there were a good cross platform alternative to cairo, I'd happily target this additional 2D drawing API. However, I don't think there currently is one. Neither gloss nor the diagrams library currently have adequate text support.

This is probably a completely stupid and bonkers idea... but I wonder whether using Inkscape's ability to be able to export PDF or PS files that can be imported into LaTeX and let LaTeX deal with the text placement/rendering would work... Rather fiddly for just a "give me an image" library though :)

Tim

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-- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

+ 1000, there are so many widely used niche libs which would greatly benefit from more examples in their test suites, or which have tractable small improvement / enhancement tickets languishing. Plus most large systems engineering does involve helping improve preexisting some part of the time. On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 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.

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There's the "doctest" package: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/doctest, which looks pretty good and has a number of users (35 direct reverse deps). It has support for cabal test integration, although I would like to see better integration with other test tools. But that can be added in the test executable I suppose. My only quibble with this suggestion is that asking beginners to do this sort of work may do more harm than good. It would certainly be helpful, but I don't think most people would find it interesting. On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Edward Z. Yang wrote:

I also support this suggestion. Although, do we have the build infrastructure for this?!

Edward

Excerpts from Michael Orlitzky's message of Mon Mar 11 19:52:12 -0700 2013:

...

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.

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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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[4] http://hub.darcs.net/simon/rss2irc/browse/NOTES.org On 3/12/13 2:13 PM, Simon Michael wrote:

Hi Brent,

hledger is an existing project whose purpose, code and installation process is relatively simple. I'm happy to do a bit of mentoring. If this sounds suitable, I can suggest some easy fixes or enhancements, eg:

...hmm. In fact nothing on my long wishlist[1][2] looks all that quick. They're kind of tricky, or require a fair bit of architectural knowledge, or they are unglamorous and boring. (I'd love to be proven wrong.)

shelltestrunner[3] or rss2irc[4] are much smaller projects, but their backlogs are not all that pretty either. If any of these are of interest let me know and I can look harder for suitable jobs.

-Simon

[1] https://code.google.com/p/hledger/issues/list?can=2&q=&colspec=ID+Type+Status+Summary+Reporter+Opened+Stars&sort=&groupby=&mode=grid&y=Component&x=Status&cells=tiles&nobtn=Update

[2] http://hub.darcs.net/simon/hledger/NOTES.org#2140

[3] http://hub.darcs.net/simon/shelltestrunner/browse/NOTES.org

[4] http://hub.darcs.net/simon/shelltestrunner/browse/NOTES.org