On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:39:11 +0200, Tillmann Rendel <rendel@daimi.au.dk> wrote:
Benjamin L.Russell wrote: [...]
A quick web search revealed that quite a number of programming languages have beginners@... lists. Interestingly, their description invariantly includes the term "a friendly place", which may be nice for a beginner to read before subscribing, but is somewhat misleading in the case of the Haskell community, which is a big friendly place in itself.
Indeed. I just did a search on the Internet, and came up with four examples of either existing mailing list names including beginners/tutor, or posts by users looking for such mailing lists; viz.: "ocaml_beginners : Ocaml Beginners": http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners/#ans ocaml_beginners@yahoogroups.com "Do [sic] a "Python beginners e-mail list" exist?": http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-July/330615.html Nabble - fink-beginners forum & mailing list archive: http://www.nabble.com/fink-beginners-f4237.html Tutor Info Page: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor The naming trend seems to be as follows: For beginner lists, as opposed to announcement-related lists: Iif the name of the domain does not include the language-name, then the list name is <language-name>_beginners@domain-name For example, in the case of OCaml (see the aforementioned "ocaml_beginners : Ocaml Beginners" at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners/#ans), it is ocaml_beginners@yahoogroups.com However, if the name of the domain includes the language-name, then the language-name is truncated from the list name, as follows: tutor@<language-name>.org For example, in the case of Python (see the aforementioned "Tutor Info Page" at http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor), it is tutor@python.org Since the overall response seems to be to prefer "beginners" for the list-name here, logic would seem to dictate that the optimal choice would be beginners@haskell.org If so, we would then have the following mailing list: Name of List: Beginners Address of List: beginners@haskell.org Description: Discussion about beginner issues in learning Haskell (per Claus Reinke's emphasis on a "list charter," in his response at 22:28 on 2008/07/14); viz.:
What is needed is a discussion of list charter. The only thing I've seen was "Discussion about beginner questions and issues in teaching Haskell", with the implicit assumption that those beginners are non-academic students, but in some form of education/school. )
If this is acceptable to everyone, I am considering suggesting the above to Simon. Any comments, responses, suggestions, etc.? -- Benjamin L. Russell