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

[Vo Minh Thu]

2013/3/11 Brent Yorgey <byorgey at seas.upenn.edu>:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I am currently teaching a half-credit introductory Haskell class for
> undergraduates.  This is the third time I've taught it.  Both of the
> previous times, for their final project I gave them the option of
> contributing to an open-source project; a couple groups/individuals
> took me up on it and I think it ended up being a modest success.
>
> So I'd like to do it again this time around, and am looking for
> particular projects I can suggest to them.  Do you have an open-source
> project with a few well-specified tasks that a relative beginner (see
> below) could reasonably make a contribution towards in the space of
> about four weeks? I'm aware that most tasks don't fit that profile,
> but even complex projects usually have a few "simple-ish" tasks that
> haven't yet been done just because "no one has gotten around to it
> yet".
>
> If you have any such projects, I'd love to hear about it!  Just send
> me a paragraph or so describing your project and explaining what
> task(s) you could use help with --- something that I could put on the
> course website for students to look at.
>
> Here are a few more details:
>
> * The students will be working on the projects from approximately the
>   end of this month through the end of April.  During the next two
>   weeks they would be contacting you to discuss the possibility of
>   working on your project.
>
> * By "relative beginner" I mean someone familiar with the material
>   listed here: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/lectures.html and just
>   trying to come to terms with Applicative and Monad.  They definitely
>   do not know much if anything about optimization/profiling, GADTs,
>   the mtl, or Haskell-programming-in-the-large.  (Although part of the
>   point of the project is to teach them a bit about
>   programming-in-the-(medium/large)).
>
> * 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.

Maybe it is a too small project (and not a contribution to an existing
project), but a Haskell wrapper around PostgreSQL setproctitle code
would be nice (something similar exists in the Python world).

Otherwise I have began some "infrastructure" projects on GitHub that
are all pretty simple but could be damn useful: curved is meant to be
a drop-in-replacement for graphite (it is almost the case), sentry is
a process-monitoring tool, humming is a job queue on top of
PostgreSQL, hlinode is a binding to the Linode API, ... They all have
in common that they are small, self-contained, and quite often just
massaging around rawSystem calls, database "execute" calls, or
GET/POST calls.

Thu