[Haskell-cafe] Haskell.org GSoC

[Daniel Kraft]

Hi,

I noticed last year Haskell.org was a mentoring organization for 
Google's Summer of Code, and I barely noticed some discussion about it 
applying again this year :)

I participated for GCC in 2008 and would like to try again this year; 
while I'm still active for GCC and will surely stay so, I'd like to see 
something new at least for GSoC.  And Haskell.org would surely be a 
very, very nice organization.

Since I discovered there's more than just a lot of imperative languages 
that are nearly all the same, I love to do some programming in Prolog, 
Scheme and of course Haskell.  However, so far this was only some toy 
programs and nothing "really useful"; I'd like to change this (as well 
as learning more about Haskell during the projects).

Here are some ideas for developing Haskell packages (that would 
hopefully be of general use to the community) as possible projects:

- Numerics, like basic linear algebra routines, numeric integration and 
other basic algorithms of numeric mathematics.

- A basic symbolic maths package; I've no idea how far one could do this 
as a single GSoC project, but it would surely be a very interesting 
task.  Alternatively or in combination, one could try to use an existing 
free CAS package as engine.

- Graphs.

- Some simulation routines from physics, though I've not really an idea 
what exactly one should implement here best.

- A logic programming framework.  I know there's something like that for 
Scheme; in my experience, there are some problems best expressed 
logically with Prolog-style backtracking/predicates and unification. 
This could help use such formulations from inside a Haskell program. 
This is surely also a very interesting project.

What do you think about these ideas?  I'm pretty sure there are already 
some of those implemented, but I also hope some would be new and really 
of some use to the community.  Do you think something would be 
especially nice to have and is currently missing?

Thanks for your comments,
Daniel