[Haskell] Re: on starting Haskell-Edu, a new education-related Haskell-related mailing list

[Benjamin L.Russell]

On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:39:11 +0200, Tillmann Rendel
<rendel at daimi.au.dk> wrote:

>Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
> [...]
>
>A quick web search revealed that quite a number of programming languages 
>have beginners at ... lists. Interestingly, their description invariantly 
>includes the term "a friendly place", which may be nice for a beginner 
>to read before subscribing, but is somewhat misleading in the case of 
>the Haskell community, which is a big friendly place in itself.

Indeed.  I just did a search on the Internet, and came up with four
examples of either existing mailing list names including
beginners/tutor, or posts by users looking for such mailing lists;
viz.:

"ocaml_beginners : Ocaml Beginners":
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners/#ans
ocaml_beginners at yahoogroups.com

"Do [sic] a "Python beginners e-mail list" exist?":
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-July/330615.html

Nabble - fink-beginners forum & mailing list archive:
http://www.nabble.com/fink-beginners-f4237.html

Tutor Info Page:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor

The naming trend seems to be as follows:

For beginner lists, as opposed to announcement-related lists:

Iif the name of the domain does not include the language-name, then
the list name is 

<language-name>_beginners at domain-name

For example, in the case of OCaml (see the aforementioned
"ocaml_beginners : Ocaml Beginners" at
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners/#ans), it is 

ocaml_beginners at yahoogroups.com

However, if the name of the domain includes the language-name, then
the language-name is truncated from the list name, as follows:

tutor@<language-name>.org

For example, in the case of Python (see the aforementioned "Tutor Info
Page" at http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor), it is

tutor at python.org

Since the overall response seems to be to prefer "beginners" for the
list-name here, logic would seem to dictate that the optimal choice
would be 

beginners at haskell.org

If so, we would then have the following mailing list:

Name of List:  Beginners
Address of List:  beginners at haskell.org
Description:  Discussion about beginner issues in learning Haskell
(per Claus Reinke's emphasis on a "list charter," in his response at
22:28 on 2008/07/14); viz.:

> What is needed is a discussion of list charter. The only thing I've
> seen was "Discussion about beginner questions and issues in
> teaching Haskell", with the implicit assumption that those beginners
> are non-academic students, but in some form of education/school.
)

If this is acceptable to everyone, I am considering suggesting the
above to Simon.  Any comments, responses, suggestions, etc.?

-- Benjamin L. Russell