[Haskell-cafe] Re: Suggestions for an MSc Project?

John Smith voldermort at hotmail.com
Tue Jul 6 02:22:38 EDT 2010


Thanks! A lot of good ideas, although a GUI or database framework look like the most promising possibilities at the 
moment. I like the email/wiki idea, although it may not meet the University's academic requirements. (Would probably 
just be an email client running on top of a Wiki.) It may also require a decent GUI/persistence framework, so this would 
be a good project to bring both of these together!

Any further comments from those with experience in GIU/databases on Haskell?

On 05/07/2010 23:51, Jason Dagit wrote:
> Have you looked over Don's list of suggested summer of code projects?
>
> These were the suggested ones by Don:
> http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/the-8-most-important-haskell-org-gsoc-projects/
>
> Here are the ones that were actually accepted:
> http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/the-7-haskell-projects-in-the-google-summer-of-code/
>
> It seems like anything from the original list that isn't being tackled would count as an important contribution.  Summer
> of Code is probably a smaller scope than your MSc, but that doesn't strike me as a problem.  Typically in any software
> project, once you start working on it you can easily find room to expand it in useful directions.  Similarly with the
> need for a research component.  If you get creative you should be able to find some aspect that others haven't investigated.
>
> One thing I've been wanting lately is a good client / server, meeting scheduling / calendaring / time tracking software.
>   Something along the lines of Meeting Maker or iCal, but open source, extensible, and with the polish of Google
> Calendar.  I've been thinking about it a lot and I have several other usability ideas to throw in to make it really
> shine.  I keep meaning to post my requirements on my blog.  Maybe I'll get to that this week.
>
> Another thing I'd like, is to augment GHC with a type level debugger.  One simple idea I had for that was to have GHC
> dump out the source code it's type checking with the types it has figured out (and the ones that don't type check,
> expect vs. inferred) annotated at every term and subterm.  This has some technical hurdles, but mainly I think it has
> usability concerns to address.  For example, how to let the user zoom in to the smallest term and see the type while
> also letting them select larger terms and see the type, all without being overwhelmed.  Something that novices can make
> sense of but experts enjoy using too.
>
> Here is another idea.  I'd like to see more integration between personal wikis (ones you run on localhost) and email
> systems.  Imagine that an email comes into your inbox and then you can annotate the email by adding notes, sort of like
> track changes in Word.  The email + notes stays in your inbox.  It would be nice if you could bookmark those emails too
> in your web browser or similar.  This would be handy for me as I sometimes reference specific emails for a long time and
> I often want to make notes as I reference them.  Currently I paste the email into gitit and go for there.
>
> A universal interface / adapter for version control systems would be nice, but I think this one needs more research.  We
> currently have a problem with vcs that each one speaks its own language.  To me this is analogous to only being able to
> email people who use the same email client as you.  Quite suboptimal.
>
> I hope that helps,
> Jason



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