Jan Skibinski:
> On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Claus Reinke wrote:
>
> [List of some examples of library status information..]
>
> They are all fine and useful. But I do not see any clear
> incentives for authors for doing so, apart from their
> desire to make libraries perfect .. in their spare time,
> if any, of course. If the develepment of good libraries
> had similar gratifying effects as publishing scientific
> papers the situation could have looked quite differently,
> I guess.
The motivation for my proposal was to make available at
least some of the information needed by library users, in the
context of *less-than-perfect* library maintenance. So the
proposal was to offer the separate lists at haskell.org that
others had asked for, but to base membership in the sections
on information that is readily available to the haskell.org
maintainers (when they last heard from the authors).
The only additional info authors were asked to provide were
development plans (one sentence) and range of applicability
(one sentence). Of course, there are other things one would
like to see, but I think these two sentences (with the kind of
answers indicated), together with a last-contact date would
improve the usefulness of the library listing at haskell.org
without stopping any library authors from submitting their
works.
My favourite example are GUIs for Haskell: seeing all those nice
ideas nicely presented in publications and in conference talks, it is
all too easy to fall into the trap and think that the GUI problem for
Haskell is solved. Well, it has been solved (usually for specific
implementations or platforms..), several times, but which of these
solutions are useful options for a Haskell GUI today (not: GHC
under X, Hugs under Windows, all implementations with
extension Y, Tk of some releases ago, ..; but: current Haskell,
most -if not all- implementations, all platforms supported by
these implementations, currently maintained and in use)?
Someone asks about GUIs on comp.lang.functional, on the
Haskell list, or elsewhere, and we just point them towards the
library list at haskell.org - question answered, problem solved,
isn't Haskell just nice?-)
Well, unless we follow the questioners on their quest ...
Today, our prospective Haskell users can go to haskell.org, and
find links to lots of good libraries, but how are they to know which
of these are (a) still usable (with which current Haskell
implementations on which platforms?), (b) in use (how big is the
user community, what are the experiences?) (c) even better: still
actively maintained?
They might download one of the libraries that looks portable,
and find it working, more or less, but with quite a few changes
that would have to be made to it, too. Then they might look for
todo-lists, release plans, etc., but those are all just guesses,
telling us what the authors would have liked to do some time
ago (planned release dates are much better, but what if they
lie in the past? Wait for some months for the imminent new
release? Contact the authors, who -presumably- would have
fulfilled their own promises, had they been able to?).
Seeing a last-contact date for a library tells me more: on that
date, the authors' plans where these. If the date is recent, the
library is close to what I want, and others are using it, I can
give it a chance and may hope that any problems can be sorted
out by perusing the source and contacting the author or other
users. If the library would need some substantial changes, no
current users are known, and the last contact with the author
was half a year ago, there seem to be only two options: hack
it yourself, or leave it alone and try something else.
Most potential Haskell programmers will draw their conclusions
in silence, without pointing out to the person who answered
their original question that the reference to "all the libraries at
haskell.org" was not as useful as it seemed to be. So if such
a complaint comes back to the Haskell list, as it did in the mails
that started this thread, we should better take notice.
> I just read "Heath B.O'Connell, Physicists thriving with
> paperless publishing", e-print physics/0007040, (on
> "xxx.lanl.gov"), and I was amazed to learn how well this
> paperless revolution works there, notwithstanding all
> sorts of extra efforts needed for this to work as smoothly
> as it does. But there _is_ a strong incentive to be quickly
> read, and in the same token, to access information as
> quickly as possible.
They seem well organized, and I assume your amazement
relates to their organization, not to the fact that paperless
(snail-mail-less might be more accurate) publishing works?
I get most interesting current papers from the authors' home
pages or ftp directories (it is such a hindrance if someone's papers
are not online..), and I try to keep my own publications (few as
they are) online, too. When faced with the choice of either
getting my thesis "properly" published with ISBN number, etc.
or keeping the copyright and the chance to put it on the web,
I opted for the latter, because I know that I find it much easier
to get other peoples' papers and theses if they are online.
The good thing about "real" publications is not that I have to
give up copyrights, that proceedings take a long time to appear,
that readers have to pay lots of money, or that libraries need
lots of storage space. Firstly, it is peer review - knowing that
the papers have been checked for quality by colleagues, and
that the authors had to take referee comments into consideration
to get their papers accepted. Secondly, it is easy and reliable
reference (URLs change, home pages disappear, authors
move or die, ..).
It seems as if physicists have managed to address both issues
online, using paper publishing only for long-term storage and
reference. Well done! We should follow their lead.
> But what kind of gratification one gets from writing
> a library, good or bad? Don't ask me, I have not seen
> any so far, unless when I do something strictly commercially.
Well, as Peter Hancock pointed out, there is some direct
gratification to be had from writing software. There is the old
hierarchy of understanding (by learning, by teaching, by
programming), for instance (due to Perlis??). But the problem
here is what we gain from cleaning up, publishing and
maintaining the software.
Are you referring to the feedback one doesn't get when one
puts one's works online? Or to the academic quality reviews
that prefer books over journal publications over conference
publications over non-peer-reviewed publications over
miscellaneous scientific output, implying that they really don't
care about anything but the first few categories?
I don't know how to change the former, but as to the latter,
most quality reviews are peer reviews (with quality standards
set by not always obvious procedures). As long as most of us
agree that software can be an appropriate format of scientific
output, especially, but not only for computer scientists (journal
publications don't run on my machine), I think (naively?) that
there is a chance of raising the level of acceptance for software
publishing.
The typical questions are: is there some science in the software,
and has it been reviewed and approved by the community of
peers? Personally, I think the second is more important than
the first (there is no reason that scientists shouldn't get academic
credit for well-engineered software if their colleagues agree
that the software helps to advance the pursuit of science).
> Secondly, I have not seen any real peer review on this
> level. I cannot speak for others, but the feedback I receive
> does not count; sporadic encouragement is not what is
> important here and web access statistics is useless too.
> Long time ago ISE Eiffel had so-called EifellShelf, where
> contributions from third parties were carefully scrutinized
> by a group at ISE in order to assure quality and conformance
> to standards. I do not know whether this model is still
> in operation, but I really liked it then, even though
> I had to put my commas and blank spaces just right, or
> put assertions where I had considered them unncecessary
> at first. It did not harm my pride at all, and it really
> helped everyone on a long run.
I think that would be a good idea for Haskell (but please,
not at the level of comma positions;-).
Perhaps haskell.org could give out reference numbers for
software? So instead of the haskell.org maintainers searching
high and low for existing software, library authors would actually
submit their stuff to get a reference number, so that they and
their users could refer to the software as published on haskell.org
as [HS-LIB-2000-01] or [HS-TOOL-2000-02] or whatever?
Once we have references to software (not only to nice publication
talking about software), the next step could be some form of
software review, perhaps itself published online as
"haskell.org - quarterly software review"?
Just some thoughts,
Claus
