[Haskell-cafe] Notes from "Haskell takes over the world" BoF at ICFP

[Christopher Done]

A big thank you, by the way, to you, Simon Marlow, Malcom Wallace and
everyone who helped getting the videos online and those that gave
talks at the Haskell Implementors' Workshop 2010. It was exciting to
watch all the videos! There was a lot of interesting and fertile
discussion.

On 6 October 2010 21:10, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
>  * Library fragmentation occuring due to type duplication (String, Text, ...)

This one is a big issue for me personally. On hpaste[1] I spent some
time converting between String/Text/ByteString/Lazy-ByteString and did
not have fun.

>  * Belgium Hackathon coming up.

See you there!

>  * A new ghci.
>        + hpaste/ghci.

What were the ideas regarding hpaste? Creating a REPL for pastes?

>  *  IDE
>        + scion. contributions. market places.
>        + documentation.
>        + EclipseFP, scion?
>        + NetBeans.

I am personally interested in scion. I have the Emacs chops to hack on
that. So far I've been making one-off scripts but it seems like
ultimately the best approach is to focus on using scion to make Emacs
a real quality Haskell environment -- and resulting contributions to
Scion can only benefit other IDEs.

Phyx- from the IRC has been working on some fairly advanced features
for Haskell Visual Studio, for those interested.

>  * haskell.org
>        + polishing the wiki.
>        + wikibooks.
>        + call for sig.

I am looking forward to having the new Haskell.org wiki[1] rolled out.
 I and Michael Snoyman have been working on cleaning up the web
development area of the wiki[2]. We really want to make it a central
and useful place for current information on web. dev in Haskell.

[1]: http://new-www.haskell.org/haskellwiki
[2]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Web

>  * haskell visual design group?
>        + consistent color themes across haskell.org sites.
>        + consistent haskell branding.

Can we get real web designers on this? Has a colour theme / logo
incarnation been decided yet? Should we make a poll with proposals? I
might whip up a simple web app for posting proposal text + image
attachments and allowing people to vote, if I can't find an existing
one. At least if the choices are static Google Docs suffices for this
and makes it easy to ask the community something.

At the moment I'm still clinging to the old colour theme of purple and
green[3][4], I like this theme but I'm open to switching both of these
web sites to a new theme if we have a consistent, re-usable
stylesheet, palette and SVG logo. I think a consistent theme is very
important.

Domains are also possibly important, too... Haskell.org, hackage,
haddock, Planet Haskell, hpaste, tryhaskell, Hoogle, Hayoo, the
soon-to-be Haskellers.com, etc. I think all these sites that are
really part of the Haskell web network and should have a consistent
theme and quick way to get "home" to Haskell.org. Imho I suppose it
might be great to also have domain consistency, e.g. haskell.org,
hackage.haskell.org, paste.haskell.org, try.haskell.org,
hoogle/hayoo.haskell.org, planet.haskell.org, etc. We already have a
few of these in use.

Digressing a little, can anyone interested in doing so merge hoogle
and Hayoo and make them part of Hackage?

I plan on making a complete interface to the #haskell IRC channel with
browsing, full text search, stats, common links, "marking" of
interesting conversations, top posted links, active hours, etc.
basically what pisg provides but... utilizing IRC as a real source of
community knowledge and activity and not just a statistical
curiousity. What I think would be neat but probably won't happen is
irc.haskell.org, but I can always put it on hsirc.org or something.

hpaste.org will interface with this site to provide context for
pastes, e.g. when I'm viewing a paste, I should see maybe ten lines of
conversation and a link to view more, so that I can see what the paste
was about.

I think both hpaste and the IRC channel are untapped sources of
information and I intend on making these two sites utilise that
information. I recently imported the last ten years' worth of IRC into
a postgresql database[5]. I used the clogparse library[6]. For a bit
of fun here's the top-ten Haskell chatters ever:

amelie=> select count(*),nick from ircevent where type = 'talk' group
by nick order by 1 desc limit 10;
 count  |    nick
--------+-------------
 643917 | lambdabot
 265466 | Cale
 248069 | dons
 224690 | shapr
 139449 | quicksilver
  88745 | SamB
  81229 | ski
  75148 | Pseudonym
  73043 | dcoutts
  72337 | ivanm
(10 rows)

[3]: http://tryhaskell.org/
[4]: http://hpaste.org/
[5]: If anyone's interested in the dump, I have uploaded it and can
email you the link. It's 174MB lzma-compressed and 900MB uncompressed.
[6]: http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2010/09/clogparse-parsing-haskell-irc-logs.html

>        + stackoverflow for new questions?
>            + keep refering to SO.

Does this suggest that I should first direct my Haskell technical
questions to SO rather than Haskell-Cafe?

>        + Simon Marlow "contributions are going up, and process is working well"

Great to hear! I have a small GHC issue I'd like to fix one weekend. I
want to get the t-shirt! "I contributed to GHC and all I got was this
lazy... "

>  * Cabal and integration with other languages.
>        + Higher barrier to entry on the Mac.

Is this the general experience? I installed the Haskell Platform on OS
X and compiled all my projects without problem. It was quite surreal,
I expected there to be loads of issues but everything just worked. I
used mac ports for the C dependencies (e.g. libcurl or fastcgi). I
don't think Gtk would work if I tried, but that's an issue on Windows
too. What problems are there specific to OS X? Admittedly I do 99% of
my Haskell hacking on Linux because I prefer Linux in general with
XMonad and GNOME.