[Haskell-cafe] Anyone up for Google SoC 2010?

Edward Kmett ekmett at gmail.com
Fri Feb 5 14:55:50 EST 2010


You can add me to the list of voices that were unwilling to use it before
the summer-of-code project due to the random incompatibilities caused by the
huge supply of extensions it supported out of the box, but who were happy to
switch to it after the changes were made to make them configurable.

That said, I don't support a major public application.

But keep in mind haskell-src-exts is used by almost every quasiquoter that
wants antiquotation, so the improvements in mere compatibility with Haskell
98 as a baseline have had fairly wide-reaching impact, affecting almost
every one of those 23 (or 57 depending how you count) dependencies on the
haskell-src-exts library. One might argue that that well exceeds your 3 or 4
feature user guideline. =)

The rest is just gravy that happens to permit a number of applications such
as refactoring browsers that were impossible with the previous
implementation. And, as I recall, the fairly radical exploratory "pretty
print . parse = id" goal was explicitly listed merely as a secondary goal on
the original application.

It seems hardly appropriate to judge the impact of the entire SoC effort on
the impact of that secondary exploratory component.

-Edward Kmett

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 12:48 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 6:20 AM, Sittampalam, Ganesh
> <ganesh.sittampalam at credit-suisse.com> wrote:
> > Gwern Branwen wrote:
> >> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 8:14 PM, Henk-Jan van Tuyl <hjgtuyl at chello.nl>
> >> wrote:
> >>> On Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:34:34 +0100, Neil Mitchell
> >>> <ndmitchell at gmail.com>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Hi Gwern,
> >>>>
> >>>> Please update: "haskell-src-exts -> haskell-src" **Unknown**
> >>>>
> >>>> This project was an unqualified success.  haskell-src-exts is now
> >>>> one
> >>>> of the most commonly used Haskell libraries, achieved the goals in
> >>>> the project proposal, and is an essential piece of Haskell
> >>>> infrastructure.
> >>>
> >>> You can see this using Roel van Dijk's reversed dependencies
> >>> overview [1]: 23 direct and 57 indirect dependencies on
> >>> haskell-src-exts-1.8.0
> >>>
> >>> Regards,
> >>> Henk-Jan van Tuyl
> >>
> >> And how many of those used haskell-src-exts *before* the SoC project?
> >> And would have used it regardless? You can't point to a popular
> >> project which got a SoC student, and say look at how popular it is -
> >> obviously the SoC student was hugely successful.
> >
> > Regardless of that, is there any reason to disregard Neil's summary and
> not update your page?
> >
> > Ganesh
>
> I prefer to wait. haskell-src-exts was popular before, it was popular
> after. The question is not whether the patches were applied, or
> whether the mentor told Google it was successful, but whether it was
> the best possible use of the SoC slot. If features do not get used,
> then it wasn't a good SoC. If you know 3 or 4 uses of the new
> haskell-src-exts features in (relatively) major applications like
> hlint, then I'll concede the point and mark it a success.
>
> --
> gwern
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