[Haskell-cafe] Parsec community and up-to-date documentation

[Roman Cheplyaka]

* Konstantine Rybnikov <k-bx at k-bx.com> [2013-03-25 11:22:21+0200]
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> wrote:
> 
> > * Konstantine Rybnikov <k-bx at k-bx.com> [2013-03-25 00:19:04+0200]
> > > Hi!
> > >
> > > I've been busy with (trying to) learning/using parsec lately and as a
> > > beginner had a lot of headache starting from outdated documentation in
> > > various places, lack of more tutorials, confusion between Text.Parsec and
> > > Text.ParseCombinator modules and so on.
> > >
> > > While I solved most of my problems via googling / reading stackoverflow /
> > > reading source code (of outdated version first, btw, the one I got from
> > > Daan's homepage :), I still had a feeling all the time that I'm doing
> > > something wrong and that I can't find place where "party is going on".
> > >
> > > So I wondered, what can I do to create a community around Parsec, to get
> > > issue tracking, pull-requests, up-to-date comprehensive documentation and
> > > tutorials etc.? Parsec seems like a perfect candidate for something like
> > > this.
> >
> > A couple of years ago I decided to do pretty much this — create
> > up-to-date comprehensive documentation for Parsec. Unfortunately, the
> > project turned out too ambitious for me at the time. The only part of it
> > that I've finished is published as this SO answer:
> > http://stackoverflow.com/a/6040237/110081
> >
> > Of course, SO answers are not a substitute for good documentation, but
> > they are a good way to start, and you can later merge those answers into
> > something more coherent. So this is one way you approach it — just
> > publish the knowledge you've acquired as self-answered questions on SO.
> >
> > Roman
> >
> 
> Thanks, Roman. I've totally read this answer some time yesterday (too late,
> unfortunately). You also seemed (due to logs) to implement functionality I
> needed (lookAhead, if I'm not mistaken). Thanks!
> 
> But I just don't understand why such a basic thing as live community-hub
> for a project (github page would be enough for this) is so hard to create.
> I'm also not saying I would write a lot of docs, but at least making them
> more "up to date" doesn't look as too ambitious task.

It's not hard to create — it's hard to get traction.

Anyway, don't be discouraged by my experience. Go for it!

I put back my original repo at https://github.com/feuerbach/parsec-doc —
feel free to use it. In particular, it contains an interesting analysis
of parsec usage by Dmitry Astapov.

Roman