[Haskell-cafe] Open-source projects for beginning Haskell students?

[Ben]

On Mar 11, 2013, at 11:26 AM, Jason Dagit wrote:

> Myself and several of my friends would find it useful to have a plotting library that we can use from ghci to quickly/easily visualize data. Especially if that data is part of a simulation we are toying with. Therefore, this proposal is for: A gnuplot-, matlab- or plotinum-like plotting API (that uses diagrams as the backend?). The things to emphasize:
>   * Easy to install: No gtk2hs requirement. Preferably just pure haskell code and similar for any dependencies. Must be cross platform.
>   * Frontend: graphs should be easy to construct; customizability is not as important
>   * Backend: options for generating static images are nice, but for the use case we have in mind also being able to render in a window from ghci is very valuable. (this could imply something as purely rendering to JuicyPixels and I could write the rendering code)
>  
> * What I would hope from you is a willingness to exchange email and/or
>   chat with the student(s) over the course of the project, to give
>   them a bit of guidance/mentoring.  I am certainly willing to help on
>   that front, but of course I probably don't know much about your
>   particular project.
> 
> I am willing/able to take on the mentoring aspect :)

i second this, but with a different emphasis.  i would like a ggplot2-type DSL for generating graphs, for data analysis and exploration.  i agree with :

* it would be great to have no gtk2hs / cairo requirement.  (i guess this means text rendering in the diagrams-svg backend needs to be solved.)  i guess in the near-term, this is less important to me -- having a proper plotting DSL at all is an important start.

* frontend : graphs should be easy to construct, but having some flexibility is important.  the application here is being able to explore statistical data, with slicing, grouping, highlighting, faceting, etc.

* backend : static images are enough for me, interactive is a plus.  most importantly : it should be fast enough to work pleasantly with large datasets.  ggplot2 is pretty awesome but kills my machine, routinely.

i would be willing to mentor, but i'm not an expert enough i think!

best, ben