a proposal regarding libraries

[Isto Aho]

Hello,

What do you think about the following proposal to
try to activate people to build up new not-yet-seen
Haskell libraries?  I remember a discussion a couple of
months ago where somebody said that it is more important
to have imperfect libraries than to not have a perfect one.
This proposal aims for populating your favorite missing
libs...

First, the libs could be diveded into two parts: to those
that are under construction (where some reorganization may
occur in near future ~ dev libs) and to those that are more or
less stable (where reorganization is not likely to occur in the
next few years ~ stable libs). And these libs could be distributed
with the Haskell compilers so that they are usable instantly.

Second, to populate the dev libs with new funcs, it would be
relatively easy to organize monthly competitions with the new
HaskellWiki-pages.  Idea could be something like
- On the first day of the month, a lib design is released
  on the HaskellWiki, giving 12 competitions a year.
- Who completes most of the funcs, documentation, examples FIRST,
  etc, wins the competition.
- Competition tasks (e.g. an individual func) are weighted somehow.
- The HaskellWiki has page histories, which can be used to make
  judgements in cases where a task has no clear winner.
- Prices: a name on HaskellWiki Hall of the Fame page or something
  similar...

If there is enough interes in this kind of activity, there is a need for a
couple of volunteers to organize everything and to work as judges on the
competition days (or weeks). They should decide, what the competition
is about etc.  What do you think? Pros & Cons? Would you take part
in this kind of competition(s), if these were organized?

Anybody interested in developing this idea further? I'll guess many
people have their favorite missing libs that could be build this way
in collaboration and so do I.

br,
Isto