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

Mario Blažević mblazevic at stilo.com
Fri Mar 15 20:06:58 CET 2013


On 13-03-11 10:52 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 03/11/2013 11:48 AM, Brent Yorgey wrote:
>>
>> 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".
>
> It's not exciting, but adding doctest suites with examples to existing
> packages would be a great help.
>
>    * Good return on investment.
>
>    * Not too hard.
>
>    * The project is complete when you stop typing.


	In the similar spirit, many existing projects would benefit from a 
benchmark suite. It's a fairly simple but somewhat tedious process, good 
for a team work practice:

1. Take a well-defined task, like parsing JSON for example.
2. Devise a test scenario that includes the task.
3. Make a list of all libraries on Hackage which (claim to) do the task.
4. Write a simple test for each of the libraries.
5. Combine all the tests into a Criterion test suite.
6. Publish the test suite and the benchmark results.




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