[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Google Summer of Code 2009

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> gwern0:
>> (The following is a quasi essay/list of past Summer of Code projects;
>> my hope is to guide thinking about what Summer of Code projects would
>> be good to pick, and more specifically what should be avoided.
>> If you're in a hurry, my conclusions are at the bottom.
>> The whole thing is written in Markdown; for best results pass it
>> through Pandoc or view it via your friendly local Gitit wiki.)
>>
>
> Thanks for the write up!
>
> We explicitly pushed harder in 2008 to clarify and simplify the goals of
> the projects, ensure adequate *prior Haskell experience* and to
> focus on libraries and tools that directly benefit the communtity.

Oh, I didn't know that about prior experience. (I was tired enough
when I finished it that I decided to not look at the students involved
- how much prior experience they had, and how involved they were in
the Haskell community afterwards.)

> And our success rate was much higher.

That certainly does seem to be true. Looking over the 2008 projects, I
see 0 outright failures (compared to 2 in 2006),  and only 1 or 2
which might turn out to be unsuccessful (the physics engine, and
perhaps GMap or the GHC API improvements).

> So: look for things that benefit the largest number of Haskell
> developers and users, and from students with proven Haskell development
> experience. You can't learn Haskell from zero on the job, during SoC.
>
> -- Don

Inexperience is a good criterion to add to the 3 I had in my
conclusion, certainly.

-- 
gwern