From dagitj at gmail.com Thu Oct 8 00:09:19 2015 From: dagitj at gmail.com (Jason Dagit) Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2015 17:09:19 -0700 Subject: [Haskell-community] How to make the community more welcoming? Message-ID: I stumbled on this article today: http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/06/what-makes-a-good-community/ I think the author brings up some good points. I tried to share this on /r/haskell, perhaps unsuccessfully: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3nw9dh/what_makes_a_good_community/ I'm hoping that this list is a better place to discuss the points made in that article. Below are my thoughts (mostly copied from reddit). My point with bringing this up is to help us improve our community. It's not meant to unfairly criticize the actions of any particular person or anything like that. I like Haskell and I want our community to be the best that it can be. Are there specific things within reach that we could adopt from the examples in the article? I think we largely have level 0 and 1 down. It looks like level 2 where we start to loose our footing. Level 2: meaningful contributions The next step is figuring out what to do with these eager new diverse > candidates. If they?ve made it this far through the gauntlet of toxic tech > culture, they?re likely to be persistent, smart, and seeking a challenge. > If you don?t have meaningful bigger projects for them to contribute to, > they?ll move onto the next shiny thing. > Signs of a level 2 welcoming community: > * Newbie todo lists > * Larger, self-contained projects > * Welcoming, available mentors > * Programs to pay newbies (internships, summer of code, etc) > * Contributors are thanked with heartfelt sincerity and an explicit > acknowledgment of what was good and what could be improved > * Community creates a casual feedback channel for generating ideas with > newcomers (irc, mailing list, slack, whatever works) > * Code of conduct encourages developers to assume good intent We use the google summer of code as a way to pay/mentor new contributors, but I think we need more mentors and more newbie friendly projects. Just need to make it happen, I guess. Also, it looks like we incorporate some of the Level 3 things too, with committee rotations. Thanks for your time, Jason -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From chak at justtesting.org Sat Oct 24 10:48:40 2015 From: chak at justtesting.org (Manuel M T Chakravarty) Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2015 21:48:40 +1100 Subject: [Haskell-community] Downloads page & Haskell for Mac Message-ID: Sorry for jumping late into the discussion surrounding the downloads page. However, I would like to request that Haskell for Mac be added to the page. I?m of course happy to make the edits myself and to submit a pull request, but I?d first like to ask what the community thinks is an appropriate way to add this Haskell distribution. Would it be appropriate to just add a fourth bullet point to the current list of three (Minimal, Stack & HP)? Cheers, Manuel From nicolas.wu at gmail.com Sat Oct 24 14:00:28 2015 From: nicolas.wu at gmail.com (Nicolas Wu) Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2015 15:00:28 +0100 Subject: [Haskell-community] Downloads page & Haskell for Mac In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 24 October 2015 at 11:48, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote: > Sorry for jumping late into the discussion surrounding the downloads page. However, I would like to request that Haskell for Mac be added to the page. I?m of course happy to make the edits myself and to submit a pull request, but I?d first like to ask what the community thinks is an appropriate way to add this Haskell distribution. Thanks for bringing this up! Haskell for Mac looks beautiful. > Would it be appropriate to just add a fourth bullet point to the current list of three (Minimal, Stack & HP)? I'm not sure. I feel nervous about placing a product that isn't free to use on the main Haskell.org downloads page. In fact, I even feel nervous about putting links to a toolchain if it explicitly endorses a particular product or company. I don't know if that's a sentiment that's shared amongst others, but we should definitely discuss it. My preference is that the haskell.org/downloads page should be targeted at beginners and be as simple and prescriptive as possible, while allowing the exploration of libraries and projects made available by the Haskell community. I'm of the opinion that the current incarnation is too confusing as it stands with three options. With that said, I think the main downloads page should at least point to another page that lists and perhaps even discusses all the options available. This should include compilers other than GHC and links to commercially available tools. Perhaps this would be an extension of https://wiki.haskell.org/Implementations. I also think that it would be worth considering having official sponsors listed somewhere else on haskell.org, and this might be a good place for this. What do others think? Best wishes, Nick From gershomb at gmail.com Sat Oct 24 15:51:22 2015 From: gershomb at gmail.com (Gershom B) Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2015 11:51:22 -0400 Subject: [Haskell-community] Downloads page & Haskell for Mac In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hiya Manuel. So the plan was, and I guess still should be, that we were going to have a second discussion on "other download methods" at the bottom of the downloads page, and how to handle listing all sorts of various other things. For example, Haskell for Mac, Kronos IHaskell Notebook, Halcyon, Nix, the fact that one can run Haskell for free over Sage Math Cloud. Also there is the question of if we should link to some place that documents IDEs more too, since often people consider these days IDEs the third critical component of a language along with the way to compile things and the way to manage additional libraries. Anyway, people got busy and we didn't kick off this "other download methods" portion of the discussion in a very timely fashion, so thanks for the push. One question I have is about Haskell for Mac itself. Given appstore restrictions, it sort of has a dual character. I suppose my question is, ultimately, do you see it more as a "way to download haskell" or an "amazing development environment for haskell" (that ultimately has to provide a bundled compiler because of appstore issues). In any case, I don't exactly share Nicolas' concerns about pointing to commercial / non-open-source stuff, as long as we make sure we point to the100% open-source-stuff bigger and first :-) I do share the concern that the page is sort of long and confusing enough already. And as I mentioned above, Haskell for Mac is one of a number of neat tools that are not discoverable from the downloads page now. I don't think /Implementations is quite the right wiki page, but maybe we could point to two pages, one for /Install_Methods and one for /Recommended_IDEs ? (with some things like IHaskell and Haskell for Mac living in both)? -gershom On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 6:48 AM, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote: > Sorry for jumping late into the discussion surrounding the downloads page. However, I would like to request that Haskell for Mac be added to the page. I?m of course happy to make the edits myself and to submit a pull request, but I?d first like to ask what the community thinks is an appropriate way to add this Haskell distribution. > > Would it be appropriate to just add a fourth bullet point to the current list of three (Minimal, Stack & HP)? > > Cheers, > Manuel > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-community mailing list > Haskell-community at haskell.org > http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-community From johnw at newartisans.com Sat Oct 24 17:47:13 2015 From: johnw at newartisans.com (John Wiegley) Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2015 10:47:13 -0700 Subject: [Haskell-community] Downloads page & Haskell for Mac In-Reply-To: (Nicolas Wu's message of "Sat, 24 Oct 2015 15:00:28 +0100") References: Message-ID: >>>>> Nicolas Wu writes: > With that said, I think the main downloads page should at least point to > another page that lists and perhaps even discusses all the options > available. This should include compilers other than GHC and links to > commercially available tools. Perhaps this would be an extension of > https://wiki.haskell.org/Implementations. > I also think that it would be worth considering having official sponsors > listed somewhere else on haskell.org, and this might be a good place for > this. > What do others think? Yes, this was the intention with our "third party downloads" section that remained unfinished at the end of the last round. Let's then begin our second round. We know we want the main downloads page to link to an "alternate methods" page, and for this other page to exhaustively describe/link to all the other means by which Haskell may be installed on a user's machine. We can begin by creating a list of everything we want to link to. Gershom has already begun this. Once we have that list, should we standardize on something like alphabetical order, so that no one option is given priority? I also agree with Nicolas that we probably shouldn't expand the current downloads page any further. It is quite long as it stands. John From chak at justtesting.org Sun Oct 25 04:13:53 2015 From: chak at justtesting.org (Manuel M T Chakravarty) Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2015 15:13:53 +1100 Subject: [Haskell-community] Downloads page & Haskell for Mac In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > Nicolas Wu : > On 24 October 2015 at 11:48, Manuel M T Chakravarty > wrote: >> Would it be appropriate to just add a fourth bullet point to the current list of three (Minimal, Stack & HP)? > > I'm not sure. I feel nervous about placing a product that isn't free > to use on the main Haskell.org downloads page. In fact, I even feel > nervous about putting links to a toolchain if it explicitly endorses a > particular product or company. I don't know if that's a sentiment > that?s shared amongst others, but we should definitely discuss it. I think, the downloads page ought to be clear and objective. As such commercial software needs to be clearly identified and the descriptions must be factual (and not read like ads). Other than that, isn?t it the purpose of haskell.org to make it as easy as possible to get up and running with Haskell? From all the feedback that I got from users so far, Haskell for Mac is by far the easiest way to get started with Haskell on a Mac. If we are up front about its commercial nature, visitors to the site can decide for themselves whether the purchase costs and the commercial nature are worth the added convenience to them. > My preference is that the haskell.org/downloads page should be > targeted at beginners and be as simple and prescriptive as possible, > while allowing the exploration of libraries and projects made > available by the Haskell community. Haskell for Mac is squarely targeted at beginners. It is arguably much more beginner friendly than any of the other alternatives. In particular, it requires no knowledge of the command line and no separate installation of an editor. Manuel From chak at justtesting.org Sun Oct 25 04:36:01 2015 From: chak at justtesting.org (Manuel M T Chakravarty) Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2015 15:36:01 +1100 Subject: [Haskell-community] Downloads page & Haskell for Mac In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2DFB3511-5C6D-483C-87C2-67FCCA3DFEB1@justtesting.org> Gershom B : > > Hiya Manuel. > > So the plan was, and I guess still should be, that we were going to > have a second discussion on "other download methods" at the bottom of > the downloads page, and how to handle listing all sorts of various > other things. For example, Haskell for Mac, Kronos IHaskell Notebook, > Halcyon, Nix, the fact that one can run Haskell for free over Sage > Math Cloud. Also there is the question of if we should link to some > place that documents IDEs more too, since often people consider these > days IDEs the third critical component of a language along with the > way to compile things and the way to manage additional libraries. > > Anyway, people got busy and we didn't kick off this "other download > methods" portion of the discussion in a very timely fashion, so thanks > for the push. > > One question I have is about Haskell for Mac itself. Given appstore > restrictions, it sort of has a dual character. I suppose my question > is, ultimately, do you see it more as a "way to download haskell" or > an "amazing development environment for haskell" (that ultimately has > to provide a bundled compiler because of App Store issues). Actually, both :) Let me share a little story that was part of the motivation for developing Haskell for Mac. The last few summers, I?ve started teaching my (now 11yro) son Haskell. The year before last, he asked me whether some of his friends could join in. In the end, I had six 9-10yros who I wanted to teach Haskell. They all brought their own (or rather parent?s) MacBooks and on our first session I asked the parents to stay around at the start, so they could enter admin passwords, while I tried to get everybody up and running with Haskell and a text editor on their laptops. It was a mess and took much longer than I had planned. (And I have been installing GHC since it was version 0.16, I believe.) Then, I had the kids use the usual mixture of text editor, command line, and ghci, which works, but was a significant distraction and cognitive burden on top of trying to teach them a bit of programming. This was the point where I decided that the status quo is ridiculous and that there are two major problems: (1) difficulty of installation of the toolchain and (2) difficulty of use of the toolchain. Haskell for Mac addresses both. Hence, it bundles the compiler and libraries on purpose, not because of the rules of the App Store. It is actually the other way around. I knew that I wanted to bundle everything, which led me to the idea of distributing through the App Store. Hence, a major purpose of Haskell for Mac is to serve as a Haskell distribution. This is why I believe it belongs on the downloads page. Manuel PS: BTW, this is exactly what Apple does with Xcode, too. Xcode bundles the compilers and tools and you get the IDE and toolchain in one App Store download. To the user, this is the most convenient option. From johnw at newartisans.com Wed Oct 28 02:56:38 2015 From: johnw at newartisans.com (John Wiegley) Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 19:56:38 -0700 Subject: [Haskell-community] Downloads page & Haskell for Mac In-Reply-To: (Manuel M. T. Chakravarty's message of "Sun, 25 Oct 2015 15:13:53 +1100") References: Message-ID: >>>>> Manuel M T Chakravarty writes: > Other than that, isn?t it the purpose of haskell.org to make it as easy as > possible to get up and running with Haskell? From all the feedback that I > got from users so far, Haskell for Mac is by far the easiest way to get > started with Haskell on a Mac. If we are up front about its commercial > nature, visitors to the site can decide for themselves whether the purchase > costs and the commercial nature are worth the added convenience to them. Hi Manuel, We still have the problem that the current downloads page is quite long. Since I can't see replacing one of those options with Haskell for Mac, that only leaves adding a fourth option -- which begs the question why other perfectly viable options are also not there. At some point, we have to draw a somewhat arbitrary line. In our "third party downloads" section, we could add a link to a page targeted specifically at beginners, with Haskell for Mac as a prominent member of the "Mac" section on that page. Would that suffice? I realize you want to get the word out to those who need to hear it, and burying the lead past a link may lose some of the audience you're aiming for. This has to be balanced against our need to keep the community-backed options clear and visible, and avoid additional confusion for the sake of a better option for some. John