On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Don Stewart <d...@galois.com> wrote: > gwern0: >> (The following is a quasi essay/list of past Summer of Code projects; >> my hope is to guide thinking about what Summer of Code projects would >> be good to pick, and more specifically what should be avoided. >> If you're in a hurry, my conclusions are at the bottom. >> The whole thing is written in Markdown; for best results pass it >> through Pandoc or view it via your friendly local Gitit wiki.) >> > > Thanks for the write up! > > We explicitly pushed harder in 2008 to clarify and simplify the goals of > the projects, ensure adequate *prior Haskell experience* and to > focus on libraries and tools that directly benefit the communtity.
Oh, I didn't know that about prior experience. (I was tired enough when I finished it that I decided to not look at the students involved - how much prior experience they had, and how involved they were in the Haskell community afterwards.) > And our success rate was much higher. That certainly does seem to be true. Looking over the 2008 projects, I see 0 outright failures (compared to 2 in 2006), and only 1 or 2 which might turn out to be unsuccessful (the physics engine, and perhaps GMap or the GHC API improvements). > So: look for things that benefit the largest number of Haskell > developers and users, and from students with proven Haskell development > experience. You can't learn Haskell from zero on the job, during SoC. > > -- Don Inexperience is a good criterion to add to the 3 I had in my conclusion, certainly. -- gwern _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe