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

[Jason Dagit]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 8:48 AM, Brent Yorgey <byorgey at seas.upenn.edu>wrote:

> 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.
>

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 :)

Jason
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