Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Hugh Perkins]

Just found this in a gmail adtext link, it's quite interesting (and
convincing): http://www.janestcapital.com/yaron_minsky-cufp_2006.pdf
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Martin Coxall]

On 7/17/07, Thomas Conway [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On 7/18/07, Hugh Perkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Am I the only person who finds it interesting/worrying that there are few to
 no people in the group who are ex-C# programmers.  I mean, you could argue
 that C# programmers are simply too stupid to do Haskell, but ... you know,
 there is another explanation ;-)

I wouldn't say too stupid, but it may be a cultural thing. People
working in C++ are more likely to be doing what I would call
technical programming, and correspondingly more likely to be
interested in Haskell, and to appreciate what it has to offer from
painful personal experience. From what I know of the marketplace,
people working in C# are more likely to be doing client/integration
work where technical finesse is less important, and are therefore less
likely to see the point.


Quite. Any C++ developer who has spent any time with Boost knows and
has experienced the horror of Boost::Lambda.

C++ template metaprogramming *is* a pattern-matching pure functional
language with type classes (template classes), but it's syntatically
ugly and far too minimal. The Boost community are doing a valiant job
of trying to add higher order capabilities to C++, but the langauge is
just not set up for it.

Maybe when C++0x matures, and C++ has concepts, variadic template
parameters etc., things will be more civilized.

Or we can use Haskell, which has them now.

FWIW, C# is slowly gaining higher order concepts too. C# 2.0: Ad hoc
polymorphism, closures (anonymous delegates). C# 3.0: Lambda
expressions, higher-order functions over collections, LINQ, etc.

Martin
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Martin Coxall]

On 7/18/07, Jon Harrop [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On Tuesday 17 July 2007 23:26:08 Hugh Perkins wrote:
 Am I the only person who finds it interesting/worrying that there are few
 to no people in the group who are ex-C# programmers.  I mean, you could
 argue that C# programmers are simply too stupid to do Haskell, but ... you
 know, there is another explanation ;-)

To understand this, I think you must look at the number of technical users for
each language. There are a huge number of technical C++ and Java programmers
but a tiny number of technical C# programmers in comparison. The few
technical C# programmers are migrating to F# because it is next door and F#
programmers are better looking.


Most C# programmers are (a) GUI programmers and (b) former VB
programmers. This means they are *guaranteed* to be less attractive
that the average C++ developer. I have proof. But it's too big to be
contained in this margin.

Martin
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Bryan Burgers]

On 7/18/07, Martin Coxall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On 7/18/07, Jon Harrop [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Tuesday 17 July 2007 23:26:08 Hugh Perkins wrote:
  Am I the only person who finds it interesting/worrying that there are few
  to no people in the group who are ex-C# programmers.  I mean, you could
  argue that C# programmers are simply too stupid to do Haskell, but ... you
  know, there is another explanation ;-)

 To understand this, I think you must look at the number of technical users for
 each language. There are a huge number of technical C++ and Java programmers
 but a tiny number of technical C# programmers in comparison. The few
 technical C# programmers are migrating to F# because it is next door and F#
 programmers are better looking.

Most C# programmers are (a) GUI programmers and (b) former VB
programmers. This means they are *guaranteed* to be less attractive
that the average C++ developer. I have proof. But it's too big to be
contained in this margin.

Martin


I heard that Fermat didn't even actually have a proof. You wouldn't be
trying to hoodwink us in the same way, would you? :)

I haven't been paying attention to the subject, but I suppose I should
pipe in now. I really enjoy Haskell. I'm probably like most people
here in that I like learning new languages: I've given Scheme a fair
shot; F# captured my interest for a while, and right now I'm toying
with Erlang. I've tried Python, used Perl for a job, determined after
an hour that PHP wasn't for me, and even looked at Ruby. The list goes
on. (Always, of course, I keep GHC on my computer.) But for work, I
use C#. And I, for one, am looking forward to C#3.0, because it will
be easier to apply my FP experience to problems when FP is the better
way to solve a problem. (You've heard the maxim that when all you have
is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; the flip side of it is that
when you've got a whole tool set including a screwdriver and you see a
screw, but your company only lets you use your hammer, it can be
frustrating to beat on the screw with the hammer.) And since I'm fresh
out of college with no experience, I'm neither in a position to even
suggest a language change in my company, nor do I have the experience
to move to the occassional Scheme or Erlang job opening I see (I don't
know if I've ever seen a Haskell job opening, and I'm guessing if I
did it would get snatched up by a more qualified programmer quite
quickly).

I guess the point being made is that there are a smaller percentage of
attractive programmers in C#; but it looked to me that people were
implying that there are /no/ knowledgeable programmers in C#; and I'd
just like to assert that maybe there are some that don't really have a
choice right now. :)

Bryan
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

Bryan Burgers wrote:

I heard that Fermat didn't even actually have a proof.


That's unsubstantiated conjecture! :-P

Oh, sure, it took over 300 years to arrive at the modern-day proof, 
which runs to over 400 pages of cutting-edge mathematics spanning 
multiple very modern disiplins, and is so dense that reputedly only 6 
people in the world actually understand it... but... um... what was I 
saying again?



I haven't been paying attention to the subject, but I suppose I should
pipe in now. I really enjoy Haskell. I'm probably like most people
here in that I like learning new languages:


I was told that Lisp is the language to end all languages. Personally, 
I tried learning it, and concluded that it sucks.


I did learn PostScript in my lunchbreak at work one time because I was 
bored though... And Tcl on another day... and I read The Poiniant Guide 
to Ruby (which was just the most bizzare thing EVER!)


Haskell is a language that has lit up my world. All of the programs I 
write are heavily math-based, and Haskell seems to be just *perfect* for 
the job. (Aside from it being so hard to make it go any faster...) To 
quote somebody else, Haskell has given a joy to programming that I 
didn't even know was missing!


Anyway, enough raphsody for now. ;-)

I'm surprised at the Java comments... I always thought Java was a 
language for throwing together Tic-Tac-Toe demos?


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Martin Coxall]

And this is where I think Haskell has it all over C++, Java, and the
rest. Haskell is easy to learn at a simple level, and hard to learn at
the expert level, but once learned is very powerful and has excellent
payoffs in terms of productivity. With C++ or Java, the expertise is
somewhat easier to acquire, but you never get the payoff.


That may be true of Java, but it's not of C++. C++'s language
specification is so big, it's almost too big to fit in one person's
brain. It takes many years of studied confusion and a particularly
anal frame of mind to work out what it, and what isn't, legal. And to
top it off, it has a small pattern-matching pure-functional language
with type classes built in that only runs at compile time. And that's
before you get started on learning the various modern idioms you need
to learn to stop C++ from burning you on the arse.


And before
you all flame, yes, I do know C++ at an expert level, and that is
exactly why, after 7 years of writing server software in C++, I now
want to do it in Haskell.


Me too, which is why I find your statement that expertise in C++ is
easy to acquire. Seeing some of my colleagues' code is enough to tell
me that this is most definitely not the case.

Martin
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Thomas Conway]

On 7/17/07, Martin Coxall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Me too, which is why I find your statement that expertise in C++ is
easy to acquire. Seeing some of my colleagues' code is enough to tell
me that this is most definitely not the case.


You're quite right. That was careless on my part. Though the way C++
is taught at the undergraduate level, and the way it is perceived by
the inexperienced is that it isn't so hard.

But then again, I've taught Java at the ugrad level, and what do I
know about Java, other that it'd be quite a nice place to have a
holiday some time :)

T.
--
Dr Thomas Conway
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:
I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Magnus Therning]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 19:43:51 +1000, Thomas Conway wrote:
On 7/17/07, Martin Coxall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Me too, which is why I find your statement that expertise in C++ is
easy to acquire. Seeing some of my colleagues' code is enough to tell
me that this is most definitely not the case.

You're quite right. That was careless on my part. Though the way C++ is
taught at the undergraduate level, and the way it is perceived by the
inexperienced is that it isn't so hard.

But then again, I've taught Java at the ugrad level, and what do I know
about Java, other that it'd be quite a nice place to have a holiday
some time :)

My wife is from Java so if you need some advice on good vacation spots
I'd be happy to ask her advice ;-)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://therning.org/magnus


pgpktMsNwDJFq.pgp
Description: PGP signature
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Martin Coxall]

On 7/17/07, Magnus Therning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 19:43:51 +1000, Thomas Conway wrote:
On 7/17/07, Martin Coxall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Me too, which is why I find your statement that expertise in C++ is
easy to acquire. Seeing some of my colleagues' code is enough to tell
me that this is most definitely not the case.

You're quite right. That was careless on my part. Though the way C++ is
taught at the undergraduate level, and the way it is perceived by the
inexperienced is that it isn't so hard.

But then again, I've taught Java at the ugrad level, and what do I know
about Java, other that it'd be quite a nice place to have a holiday
some time :)

My wife is from Java so if you need some advice on good vacation spots
I'd be happy to ask her advice ;-)



import java.wife.advice.CheapHotels;
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Hugh Perkins]

On 7/17/07, Thomas Conway [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


And this is where I think Haskell has it all over C++, Java, and the
rest. Haskell is easy to learn at a simple level, and hard to learn at
the expert level, but once learned is very powerful and has excellent
payoffs in terms of productivity. With C++ or Java, the expertise is
somewhat easier to acquire, but you never get the payoff. And before
you all flame, yes, I do know C++ at an expert level, and that is
exactly why, after 7 years of writing server software in C++, I now
want to do it in Haskell.



You know, it just occurred to me: I get the feeling that many Haskell
programmers are ex-C++ programmers, which makes a certain amount of sense
because C++ is insanely hard to debug and maintain, because of stack/heap
corruption, and lack of a GC.

Am I the only person who finds it interesting/worrying that there are few to
no people in the group who are ex-C# programmers.  I mean, you could argue
that C# programmers are simply too stupid to do Haskell, but ... you know,
there is another explanation ;-)
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Thomas Conway]

On 7/18/07, Hugh Perkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Am I the only person who finds it interesting/worrying that there are few to
no people in the group who are ex-C# programmers.  I mean, you could argue
that C# programmers are simply too stupid to do Haskell, but ... you know,
there is another explanation ;-)


I wouldn't say too stupid, but it may be a cultural thing. People
working in C++ are more likely to be doing what I would call
technical programming, and correspondingly more likely to be
interested in Haskell, and to appreciate what it has to offer from
painful personal experience. From what I know of the marketplace,
people working in C# are more likely to be doing client/integration
work where technical finesse is less important, and are therefore less
likely to see the point.

cheers,
T.
--
Dr Thomas Conway
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:
I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jon Harrop]

On Tuesday 17 July 2007 23:26:08 Hugh Perkins wrote:
 Am I the only person who finds it interesting/worrying that there are few
 to no people in the group who are ex-C# programmers.  I mean, you could
 argue that C# programmers are simply too stupid to do Haskell, but ... you
 know, there is another explanation ;-)

To understand this, I think you must look at the number of technical users for 
each language. There are a huge number of technical C++ and Java programmers 
but a tiny number of technical C# programmers in comparison. The few 
technical C# programmers are migrating to F# because it is next door and F# 
programmers are better looking.

You can find evidence of this simply by searching for mundane numerical 
libraries like Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) implementations. If you do this 
for C++ or Java you find hundreds of implementations, some of which will 
work. For OCaml, you find a handful of libraries all bundled with automated 
proofs of their correctness. When I did this for all .NET languages a couple 
of months ago, there was nothing worth having (even among expensive 
commercial solutions). So I wrote my own and productized it. Our FFT library 
in C# is an order of magnitude less popular than our technical libraries for 
OCaml but this is offset by the fact that people using C# have an order of 
magnitude more money.

So I would say that the Haskell community can expect immigrants who are 
technical (or they wouldn't consider a fringe language) and that means they 
will be migrating primarily from C++ and Java. If you want to attract the 
maximum number of users then target your educational material at those 
people.

The C++ programmers will know that coding to the metal is always essential and 
will demand proof that Haskell is as fast as C. They will also need to know 
how to unravel low-dimensional vector and matrix routines at compile time.

The Java programmers will know that performance (particularly startup time) is 
completely irrelevant but being cross-platform and having extreme 
interoperability is pivotal. They will be particularly impressed by Haskell's 
brevity and the disappearance of some of Java's keywords like public, static, 
void and Factory.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/?e
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Derek Elkins]

On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 00:26 +0200, Hugh Perkins wrote:
 On 7/17/07, Thomas Conway [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 And this is where I think Haskell has it all over C++, Java,
 and the
 rest. Haskell is easy to learn at a simple level, and hard to
 learn at
 the expert level, but once learned is very powerful and has
 excellent
 payoffs in terms of productivity. With C++ or Java, the
 expertise is 
 somewhat easier to acquire, but you never get the payoff. And
 before
 you all flame, yes, I do know C++ at an expert level, and that
 is
 exactly why, after 7 years of writing server software in C++,
 I now
 want to do it in Haskell. 
 
 You know, it just occurred to me: I get the feeling that many Haskell
 programmers are ex-C++ programmers, which makes a certain amount of
 sense because C++ is insanely hard to debug and maintain, because of
 stack/heap corruption, and lack of a GC. 
 
 Am I the only person who finds it interesting/worrying that there are
 few to no people in the group who are ex-C# programmers.  I mean, you
 could argue that C# programmers are simply too stupid to do Haskell,
 but ... you know, there is another explanation ;-) 

Don't you think it's a little early for people to be abandoning C# en
masse?  For example, there are plenty of ex/current Java programmers.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:

zednenem:
  

On 7/15/07, Derek Elkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


There is no version of bytestrings without stream fusion and there never
was.  Bytestrings have no compiler support, it is just a library.
  

I'm not sure that's correct. Stream fusion is a particular fusion
technique that wasn't introduced until fairly recently.

From what I can tell, none of the versions available from
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/fps.html include it. You have to go
to http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/papers/CSL06.html and get the
code from the fps-unstable branch.



That's right. Both stream fusion for lists and bytestrings are currently
only in darcs,

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/fps-unstable/
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/streams/list/

Bytestrings will be streamed by the next release.
  


...which brings me back to my original how do I know if it's there? 
question. ;-)


My copy of GHC sitting here certainly *has* support for lists and byte 
strings in it - but I have no clue what version...


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Malcolm Wallace]

Alex Queiroz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  This is so much true. It has the effect of disguising Haskell as
 a PhD-only language.

And what would be wrong with Haskell being a PhD-only language, if it
were true?

OK, so I'm not genuinely suggesting that you must possess or be studying
for a PhD, to grok Haskell.  But I find nothing alarming about the
suggestion that one needs a fairly high level of intelligence, and some
training, in order to be able to use Haskell effectively.

After all, we would expect the same attributes (intelligence and
training) from a neurosurgeon, a nuclear scientist, or someone who
calculates how to land a person on the moon.  Programming computers may
not seem very skilled to most people, but maybe that is simply because
we are so familiar with it being done so badly.  I'm all for improving
the quality of software, and the corollary is that that means improving
the quality of programmers (by stretching our brains!).

Regards,
Malcolm
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Alex Queiroz]

Hallo,

On 7/16/07, Malcolm Wallace [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


OK, so I'm not genuinely suggesting that you must possess or be studying
for a PhD, to grok Haskell.  But I find nothing alarming about the
suggestion that one needs a fairly high level of intelligence, and some
training, in order to be able to use Haskell effectively.



If I say I'm not stupid, would you believe me? I'm not saying
that Visual Basic-level programmers should be able to understand
haskell without a lot more studying and practice. What I'm saying is
that almost every topic in Haskell Café evolves into a very high level
discussion that may frighten some beginners, as it seems that without
a PhD in programming languages and category theory, the language is
not for you.

Cheers,
--
-alex
http://www.ventonegro.org/
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Re[2]: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Malcolm,

Monday, July 16, 2007, 4:52:01 PM, you wrote:

 After all, we would expect the same attributes (intelligence and
 training) from a neurosurgeon, a nuclear scientist, or someone who
 calculates how to land a person on the moon.  Programming computers may
 not seem very skilled to most people, but maybe that is simply because
 we are so familiar with it being done so badly.

are you ever tried, for example, programming GUI applications using
WinAPI directly? it required serious skills but i don't think that we
lose too much with all the modern RAD tools

otoh, i don't think that Haskell by itself is too complex. i seen the
same complaints in the early GUI era, early OOP era. Haskell and
functional programming in whole just need to have larger teaching
base: courses, books and so on. and PhDs will always find some tricky
ideas just to prove that they are smarter than other people ;)

-- 
Best regards,
 Bulatmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Hugh Perkins]

On 7/16/07, Malcolm Wallace [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


After all, we would expect the same attributes (intelligence and
training) from a neurosurgeon, a nuclear scientist, or someone who
calculates how to land a person on the moon.  Programming computers may
not seem very skilled to most people, but maybe that is simply because
we are so familiar with it being done so badly.  I'm all for improving
the quality of software, and the corollary is that that means improving
the quality of programmers (by stretching our brains!).



You want people doing difficult expensive high-risk tasks to be intelligent
and well trained, but you want their task to be as easy as possible.

Would you rather a nuclear reactor needs to be controlled by feeding in
punch cards, or by having a big round dial labelled power, that you can
move from 0 to 200 MegaWatts?  Of course, you'd like the guy moving that
dial to be well trained and intelligent.  Welcome to why flying airlines is
well-paid and boring.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jonathan Cast]

On Monday 16 July 2007, Hugh Perkins wrote:
 On 7/16/07, Malcolm Wallace [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  After all, we would expect the same attributes (intelligence and
  training) from a neurosurgeon, a nuclear scientist, or someone who
  calculates how to land a person on the moon.  Programming computers may
  not seem very skilled to most people, but maybe that is simply because
  we are so familiar with it being done so badly.  I'm all for improving
  the quality of software, and the corollary is that that means improving
  the quality of programmers (by stretching our brains!).

 You want people doing difficult expensive high-risk tasks to be intelligent
 and well trained, but you want their task to be as easy as possible.

 Would you rather a nuclear reactor needs to be controlled by feeding in
 punch cards, or by having a big round dial labelled power, that you can
 move from 0 to 200 MegaWatts?  Of course, you'd like the guy moving that
 dial to be well trained and intelligent.  Welcome to why flying airlines is
 well-paid and boring.

*For airline pilots.*  For most people, flying airliners is poorly-paid and 
quite exciting (at least up until the inevitable crash).  Haskell may be a 
PhD language, but (that is, it isn't, but even if it were) it's quite easy to 
work in for PhDs.  Which isn't at all the same thing as being easy to work in 
for VB programmers.

Jonathan Cast
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-core
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-emacs
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Thomas Conway]

On 7/16/07, Malcolm Wallace [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


OK, so I'm not genuinely suggesting that you must possess or be studying
for a PhD, to grok Haskell.  But I find nothing alarming about the
suggestion that one needs a fairly high level of intelligence, and some
training, in order to be able to use Haskell effectively.


When I was a teenager I thought people with PhDs were minor deities.
Having done one, and knowing lots of people with them, I can tell you,
the vast majority of people with a PhD (including me)  have merely
above average intelligence. A PhD is not a mark of intelligence. It's
a mark of persistence. (Shall we say obsession?)

I think Malcolm's analogy to other professions is quite apt. If we
expect to be taken seriously as professionals, it would be
unsurprising to find that we need to engage in some strenuous [mental]
effort to acquire the skills.

And this is where I think Haskell has it all over C++, Java, and the
rest. Haskell is easy to learn at a simple level, and hard to learn at
the expert level, but once learned is very powerful and has excellent
payoffs in terms of productivity. With C++ or Java, the expertise is
somewhat easier to acquire, but you never get the payoff. And before
you all flame, yes, I do know C++ at an expert level, and that is
exactly why, after 7 years of writing server software in C++, I now
want to do it in Haskell.

cheers,
T
--
Dr Thomas Conway
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:
I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
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Re[2]: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Miguel Mitrofanov]

ACP Daily traffic on the whole of the Usenet takes up a few
ACP terabytes, and you presumably want to store more than one day
ACP worth of Usenet traffic. You also need to keep in sync with the
ACP other Usenet servers, as you are not the sole provider of
ACP content.

NNTP server are not requiered to mirror all of USENET, you know. In
particular, imaginary nntp.haskell.org NNTP server wouldn't be
required to mirror ANY part of USENET except for (imaginary also)
haskell-related groups. In fact, NNTP is about the same as HTTP - but
without all that Web20 mess.

Of course, if you are an ISP, you would probably want to mirror USENET
to make your users happy; but if you're not, you don't need it.

ACP Unsurprisingly, my ISP only authorizes its own users to access
ACP that particular service.)

But it doesn't block their access to OTHER NNTP servers, I guess. And
if it does, it's a pretty good reason to change ISP. Actually, it was
a good reason for me, since I needed access to ddt.demos.su server,
which seems to be one of the few, hosting fido7.ru.* newsgroups.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrea Rossato]

On Sat, Jul 14, 2007 at 11:24:36AM +0800, Michael T. Richter wrote:
 I've seen this pattern so often in communities.  I've also seen it in
 management (the supervisor/manager who can do the job better than his
 underlings -- so he does) or in teaching (the popular teacher gets a
 heavier courseload, in effect being punished for being good) or in a
 myriad of other social enterprises.


I may be wrong, but I think you do not get the specificity of the
Haskell community, that is quite peculiar, I'd say.

When I first met Haskell, about a year ago, I started asking to the
mailing list but, since I wanted to contribute back, I started also
answering, with the results I told you about.

I then decided to start using the wiki, possibly a more friendly
place: I wrote a(nother) tutorial about monads, intended for
beginners. I also wrote something that I hope could be funny and yet
give some ideas on monads (it is called Meet Bob The Monadic Lover).

The only reaction I received was a couple of Haskell Top Gurus making
fun of me in the #haskell IRC channel (they did not know I was
reading, probably). As a reaction I just wanted to erase my wiki pages
and quit the community. I did only the later, but the tutorial remains
unfinished (I was thinking to finish it, but read on).

I came back a year later - some weeks ago - because of a renewed
interest for Haskell and for some compiling projects I wanted to get
involved to. So I started sending patches and writing support code
(not to be included in the project I was collaborating too).

Another Top Haskeller, instead of reading my code and telling me if it
was good or not, started investigating if my using of a given
compiler flags was due to library function abuse or not. Probably
something a Top Hakseller is supposed to ask to a supposed novice.

Now, that reminds me of a typical academic community, where people,
just because they have a higher rank than yours, are supposed to check
if you are doing things right or wrong. Now, not because they know
more, they studied more the topic you are dealing with. No, it's just
a matter of ranking. Every member of a faculty or a department knows
what I'm talking about. And even I'm doing my academic career in
Italy, known to have a very corrupted academic system - I've been
abroad and I still have to find an academic system that is not
suffering the very same problems of the Italian one: rank and not
knowledge matters.

Now, I understand why this is affecting the Haskell community: most of
the Top Haskell Gurus here are Ph.D students, with very low academic
ranks, and it is not a surprise they are sort of taking their sort of
revenge here. Or just importing here that kind of academic attitude
they live in. This is human, far too human.

The problem is that, by doing so, they hurt their community and keep
the outsiders outside, like me. Indeed, the fact that I should be used
to this kind of shit, it's my job after all, does not mean I'm going
to stand it even in a community I may decide not to join.

I don't like speaking bad about a community I'm not part of. Still I
really wanted to be part of this community.

All the best
Andrea
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrea Rossato]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 07:05:53PM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
 So how would you think we can approve? We have to help in more specific
 ways, and listen more carefully to what people are asking?

I usually do this when I want a newcomer to join my community (for
instance my research community): I study him, I read his stuff, I try
to get to know him, so that I can find for him a place that can suit
his needs, feed his curiosity, and help him improve while maximizing
his contribution to the community. I treat him as she were my fellow
researcher, and not a student I'm supposed to teach to.

Just an example: I find it so much irritating when you give a paper to
someone and, before even reading it, the receiver starts asking you if
you have already read the just published papers of authors x and y
about a topic that could slightly resemble the one of your paper
(even if actually does not)? This a the kind of behaviour I always try
to avoid with new comers. I suppose they know more then me, even if in
different area of knowledge. We are all experts of almost nothing.

But I'm talking about a small research community, with one or two new
members a year.

I have no experience in managing such a large community as this one. I
just thought that the fact that I felt repelled by the behaviour of
some of the members of this community, and please believe me when I say
that that behaviour was far from being intentionally offensive or even
disrespectful in my regards, could be useful for someone that has such
a difficult task.

All my best wishes.
Andrea
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Michael T. Richter]

On Sun, 2007-15-07 at 10:56 +0200, Andrea Rossato wrote:

  I've seen this pattern so often in communities.



 I may be wrong, but I think you do not get the specificity of the
 Haskell community, that is quite peculiar, I'd say.


I think you're wrong.  ;)  The specifics of motivation and style will
vary from community to community, but the net result is alarmingly (and
sometimes depressingly) the same: newcomers are driven away just at the
point where they're transitioning from beginners who take from the
community to intermediates who could (in theory) contribute.  The
specifics in the Haskell community are more academic in their nature
because, as you pointed out, most of the grognards are people who live
and breathe academia.  The Python community has a different engine for
the dynamic but very similar results (right down to the mockery when
people think they're not being listened in on).  The Linux kernel team
is infamous for its hostility to outsider input and has driven off a lot
of talent that could have contributed greatly to fixing up its internal
nightmares.  The FSF is a personality cult with all the negatives that
entails, again with people leaving just at the point where they could
become useful contributors.  The list goes on and on.

One of the frustrating things about seeing this happen over and over
again is the insistence of people that this community is somehow
different.  It isn't.  People are people and politics is politics.
It's all the same manure on a different pile.


 The only reaction I received was a couple of Haskell Top Gurus making
 fun of me in the #haskell IRC channel (they did not know I was
 reading, probably). As a reaction I just wanted to erase my wiki pages
 and quit the community. I did only the later, but the tutorial remains
 unfinished (I was thinking to finish it, but read on).


I was always wondering what happened to your tutorial.  Now I know.  The
mockery on a public forum?  Was not cool.  Hell, mockery with other tops
over private channels would be a childish and unhelpful reaction, but
making it open like that is outright destructive.  I'm quite frankly
disappointed to hear that it happened.


 And even I'm doing my academic career in
 Italy, known to have a very corrupted academic system [...]


I'll pit China against Italy for corruption any day.  ;)


 I don't like speaking bad about a community I'm not part of.


On the one hand I want to say please speak as badly as you can as often
as you can because the only way that problems that are driving off
potentially productive members of the community can be fixed is if
they're stared at in the face and hit with the rolled-up newspaper of
decency.  Bad dog!

On the other hand, there's this:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html  It makes me wonder if
there's any hope at all for online communities.

-- 
Michael T. Richter [EMAIL PROTECTED] (GoogleTalk:
[EMAIL PROTECTED])
The most exciting phrase to hear in science - the one that heralds new
discoveries - is not Eureka! but That's funny... (Isaac Asimov)
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Jul 15, 2007, at 0:47 , Jonathan Cast wrote:

Usenet is a giant network of NNTP servers (and UUCP servers before  
that...)
that ISPs (and various Unix sites before that) maintained at one  
time (most

seem to have given up on it now), with thousands of general-purpose
newsgroups that at one time were the premier online community.


I'll just point out that NNTP is a *terrible* protocol for news  
*readers*; it was originally designed to facilitate linking  
individual news servers.  (The various modern NNTP implementations  
tend to detect readers and switch to a lower overhead NNTP  
implementation which also restricts some things to keep readers from  
taking up too much overhead.)


Somewhat ironically given the origin of this thread, CMU's solution  
was to gateway NNTP to IMAP and require readers to use IMAP clients  
to read the resulting bboards.


--
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon universityKF8NH


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jules Bean]

Andrea Rossato wrote:

I may be wrong, but I think you do not get the specificity of the
Haskell community, that is quite peculiar, I'd say.


Interesting.

I've just read your message three times, and you argue eloquently, and 
coherently. But I feel a bit of a disconnection. I don't recognise the 
community you're describing!


I've found the haskell community to be one of the very friendliest I've 
ever come across on the internet. Not just friendly to me, but friendly 
to everyone who comes along. Every time I go on IRC, I see people 
(complete beginners, or less so) receiving a standard of free help and 
tuition which would put many of the world's leading computer training 
courses and degree courses to shame.


(I also don't recognise your description of the academic community; 
anecdote vs anecdote but your experience was clearly quite different 
from mine)


Jules
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Alex Queiroz]

Hallo,

On 7/14/07, Michael T. Richter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


 While it is understandable, given the intense interest most grognards of any language 
have in playing with the language, for people to enjoy conversations that go into the 
ever-more-esoteric, it is decidedly not helpful to the newcomer striving to understand 
things.  So yes:  Answer politely.  Explain your answer in detail suited to the perceived 
level of the asker.  Clear common misunderstandings.  But do not use this as a launchpad 
into the geek equivalent of language knowledge oneupmanship.  It confuses far more than 
it helps.  If you really need to enter into the game, branch out.  Don't even reply to 
the thread but start a new thread with your reply.  Leave the newcomer to the 
comprehensible side, even if it is perhaps somehow less than perfect by 
whatever standards you choose to measure perfection in.



This is so much true. It has the effect of disguising Haskell as
a PhD-only language.

Cheers,
--
-alex
http://www.ventonegro.org/
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

This is a bit tangental, but... One problem I sometimes have is not 
knowing the status of things. E.g., you read about Associated Types, and 
then you go hey, is this implemented now? is it being implemented soon? 
etc.


(Don't all rush in and tell me about ATs - I'm only picking it as an 
example. Others include, say, the GHC debugger, stream fusion, parallel 
arrays, etc etc etc.)


Maybe I'm looking wrong, but it often isn't obvious to me how to figure 
out the answer to the question does all this cool stuff work yet? I'm 
not really sure what we could change to fix that though...


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Derek Elkins]

On Sun, 2007-07-15 at 17:49 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
 This is a bit tangental, but... One problem I sometimes have is not 
 knowing the status of things. E.g., you read about Associated Types, and 
 then you go hey, is this implemented now? is it being implemented soon? 
 etc.
 
 (Don't all rush in and tell me about ATs - I'm only picking it as an 
 example. Others include, say, the GHC debugger, stream fusion, parallel 
 arrays, etc etc etc.)
 
 Maybe I'm looking wrong, but it often isn't obvious to me how to figure 
 out the answer to the question does all this cool stuff work yet? I'm 
 not really sure what we could change to fix that though...

Ah, a question that can be answered with RTFM
(http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC)

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

Derek Elkins wrote:

On Sun, 2007-07-15 at 17:49 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
  
This is a bit tangental, but... One problem I sometimes have is not 
knowing the status of things. E.g., you read about Associated Types, and 
then you go hey, is this implemented now? is it being implemented soon? 
etc.


(Don't all rush in and tell me about ATs - I'm only picking it as an 
example. Others include, say, the GHC debugger, stream fusion, parallel 
arrays, etc etc etc.)


Maybe I'm looking wrong, but it often isn't obvious to me how to figure 
out the answer to the question does all this cool stuff work yet? I'm 
not really sure what we could change to fix that though...



Ah, a question that can be answered with RTFM
(http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC)
  


I could have sworn I heard somewhere that the debugger would be in GHC 
6.6.1... but, apparently, I am mistaken. I have no idea which version it 
*is* going to be in... (Presumably the next one.)


Still, the document in question still doesn't tell me, for example, 
does the version of ByteString I'm using have all that stream fusion 
goodness I read about? I also don't see anything about the status of 
parallel arrays...


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Derek Elkins]

On Sun, 2007-07-15 at 18:47 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
 Derek Elkins wrote:
  On Sun, 2007-07-15 at 17:49 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:

  This is a bit tangental, but... One problem I sometimes have is not 
  knowing the status of things. E.g., you read about Associated Types, and 
  then you go hey, is this implemented now? is it being implemented soon? 
  etc.
 
  (Don't all rush in and tell me about ATs - I'm only picking it as an 
  example. Others include, say, the GHC debugger, stream fusion, parallel 
  arrays, etc etc etc.)
 
  Maybe I'm looking wrong, but it often isn't obvious to me how to figure 
  out the answer to the question does all this cool stuff work yet? I'm 
  not really sure what we could change to fix that though...
  
 
  Ah, a question that can be answered with RTFM
  (http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC)

 
 I could have sworn I heard somewhere that the debugger would be in GHC 
 6.6.1... but, apparently, I am mistaken. I have no idea which version it 
 *is* going to be in... (Presumably the next one.)

On the very page I linked is a link labelled The GHCi Debugger.
Clicking on it you get The debugger is currently available in GHC 6.7

Similarly for parallel arrays

There is no version of bytestrings without stream fusion and there never
was.  Bytestrings have no compiler support, it is just a library.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

Derek Elkins wrote:

On Sun, 2007-07-15 at 18:47 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
  

I could have sworn I heard somewhere that the debugger would be in GHC
6.6.1... but, apparently, I am mistaken. I have no idea which version it 
*is* going to be in... (Presumably the next one.)



On the very page I linked is a link labelled The GHCi Debugger.
Clicking on it you get The debugger is currently available in GHC 6.7

Similarly for parallel arrays
  


Doh! I didn't scroll all the way down. :-(

(I guess it's habit. I go to the Haskell home page, nagivate to the page 
you linked, and click the user manual. It's how I get to the user manual 
when I want to look up obscure GHC flags...)



There is no version of bytestrings without stream fusion and there never
was.  Bytestrings have no compiler support, it is just a library.
  


I realise it's a library - but it would be possible to implement it 
without adding the RULE section at the bottom. And indeed, the way the 
paper compares performance with and without rules turned on made me 
wonder whether the guys implemented this thing, saw hey, that's much 
faster than [Char], and then later came back and said hey, we could 
use RULES to make this faster still! Apparently that's not the case, 
but I didn't know that...


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Claus Reinke]

This is a bit tangental, but... One problem I sometimes have is not 
knowing the status of things. E.g., you read about Associated Types, and 
then you go hey, is this implemented now? is it being implemented soon? 
etc.


(Don't all rush in and tell me about ATs - I'm only picking it as an 
example. Others include, say, the GHC debugger, stream fusion, parallel 
arrays, etc etc etc.)


Maybe I'm looking wrong, but it often isn't obvious to me how to figure 
out the answer to the question does all this cool stuff work yet? I'm 
not really sure what we could change to fix that though...


the Haskell Community  Activity Reports were created in part 
to answer that kind of question. within the limitations of 6-monthly 
editions (too frequent for some projects, too infrequent for others),

they have tried to do ever since November 2001, the latest dating
from May 2007:

   http://www.haskell.org/communities/

since contributors are encouraged to look ahead in plans, as well
as look back on achievements, the interval of not knowing where
things stand is actually shorter than 6 months. provided that people
remember to write and submit entries about their favourite haskell 
projects when the editor comes calling before November/May!-)


claus


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

Claus Reinke wrote:
Maybe I'm looking wrong, but it often isn't obvious to me how to 
figure out the answer to the question does all this cool stuff work 
yet? I'm not really sure what we could change to fix that though...


the Haskell Community  Activity Reports were created in part to 
answer that kind of question. within the limitations of 6-monthly 
editions (too frequent for some projects, too infrequent for others),

they have tried to do ever since November 2001, the latest dating
from May 2007:

   http://www.haskell.org/communities/

since contributors are encouraged to look ahead in plans, as well
as look back on achievements, the interval of not knowing where
things stand is actually shorter than 6 months. provided that people
remember to write and submit entries about their favourite haskell 
projects when the editor comes calling before November/May!-)


Thanks - I'll take a look...

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[David Menendez]

On 7/15/07, Derek Elkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

There is no version of bytestrings without stream fusion and there never
was.  Bytestrings have no compiler support, it is just a library.


I'm not sure that's correct. Stream fusion is a particular fusion
technique that wasn't introduced until fairly recently.


From what I can tell, none of the versions available from

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/fps.html include it. You have to go
to http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/papers/CSL06.html and get the
code from the fps-unstable branch.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

zednenem:
 On 7/15/07, Derek Elkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 There is no version of bytestrings without stream fusion and there never
 was.  Bytestrings have no compiler support, it is just a library.
 
 I'm not sure that's correct. Stream fusion is a particular fusion
 technique that wasn't introduced until fairly recently.
 
 From what I can tell, none of the versions available from
 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/fps.html include it. You have to go
 to http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/papers/CSL06.html and get the
 code from the fps-unstable branch.

That's right. Both stream fusion for lists and bytestrings are currently
only in darcs,

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/fps-unstable/
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/streams/list/

Bytestrings will be streamed by the next release.

-- Don
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

Anthony Chaumas-Pellet wrote:

From: Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED]

  
Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody. (Unless 
it's *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody 
would configure their NNTP server differently...



The scale of an NNTP server is simply a *lot* bigger than most web
servers, where you only need as much storage capacity and bandwidth as
you have content to offer.

Daily traffic on the whole of the Usenet takes up a few terabytes, and
you presumably want to store more than one day worth of Usenet
traffic. You also need to keep in sync with the other Usenet servers,
as you are not the sole provider of content.

So, NNTP servers need to be powerhouses if they hope to serve even
part of the Usenet, and they're closer to search engines than to HTTP
servers in terms of the resources required.

(For what it's worth, my ISP uses a high-end, dedicated NNTP provider
for their Usenet service. For a regular user, it actually costs more
to subscribe to that NTTP server alone than to my ISP. Unsurprisingly,
my ISP only authorizes its own users to access that particular
service.)
  


What is this Usenet thing people keen mentioning?

When I want to visit the POV-Ray website, I point my HTTP client at 
www.povray.org and it displays the page. When I want to use the POV-Ray 
NNTP forums, I point my NNTP client at news.povray.org and it displays 
the forums. It works the same way. I don't see how this involves a few 
terabytes...


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jonathan Cast]

On Saturday 14 July 2007, Andrew Coppin wrote:
 Anthony Chaumas-Pellet wrote:
  From: Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
  Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody. (Unless
  it's *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody
  would configure their NNTP server differently...
 
  The scale of an NNTP server is simply a *lot* bigger than most web
  servers, where you only need as much storage capacity and bandwidth as
  you have content to offer.
 
  Daily traffic on the whole of the Usenet takes up a few terabytes, and
  you presumably want to store more than one day worth of Usenet
  traffic. You also need to keep in sync with the other Usenet servers,
  as you are not the sole provider of content.
 
  So, NNTP servers need to be powerhouses if they hope to serve even
  part of the Usenet, and they're closer to search engines than to HTTP
  servers in terms of the resources required.
 
  (For what it's worth, my ISP uses a high-end, dedicated NNTP provider
  for their Usenet service. For a regular user, it actually costs more
  to subscribe to that NTTP server alone than to my ISP. Unsurprisingly,
  my ISP only authorizes its own users to access that particular
  service.)

 What is this Usenet thing people keen mentioning?

 When I want to visit the POV-Ray website, I point my HTTP client at
 www.povray.org and it displays the page. When I want to use the POV-Ray
 NNTP forums, I point my NNTP client at news.povray.org and it displays
 the forums. It works the same way. I don't see how this involves a few
 terabytes...

Usenet is a giant network of NNTP servers (and UUCP servers before that...) 
that ISPs (and various Unix sites before that) maintained at one time (most 
seem to have given up on it now), with thousands of general-purpose 
newsgroups that at one time were the premier online community.

*goes back into a corner to await the inevitable flames from the rest of the 
0.01% of humanity that finds Usenet interesting...

Jonathan Cast
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-core
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-emacs
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jules Bean]

Jim Burton wrote:

Very timely! It's sad that haskell-cafe has so much noise now.


I disagree with that characterisation. I don't mean to be pedantic, but 
I don't think haskell-cafe has lots of noise. I think it has lots of 
signal! Quite different.


We don't have a problem (in my perception, at least) with the quality of 
either posts of responses. Not a general one, anyway. The only problem 
is that the volume is increasing; which is a problem if that makes it 
hard for valuable contributors to keep contributing.


 As well as being nice, can't you sometimes tell people to RTFM?

The problems people have with haskell are often conceptual, and the 
manual doesn't help them, because they don't (yet) understand the 
language well enough to understand the manual.


I very, very rarely see a question here about 'how to use a library 
funciton' or similar which could, in fact, be easily looked up in a 
manual. People do quite often respond to posts with links to the online 
library documentation, which is great.


 Or, You've asked that before,

That's certainly a fair thing to say, if it's true. I don't see that 
happening very often.


 One way of protecting the community is to protect this list from drowning
 in noise and being a bit rough with newbies who don't do any research at
 all before asking is perfectly acceptable in my view.

I disagree with that on two separate levels:

(a) I don't think being rough with newbies is the right response.
(b) I also don't think it would achieve the goal you state. Being rough 
with one newbie will not, in my experience, particularly prevent the 
next question asked by the next newbie :)


All IMHO, obviously.

Jules


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Claus Reinke]

As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:

   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png

with nearly 2000 (!) people reading haskell-cafe@, perhaps its time to
think some more about how to build and maintain this lovely Haskell
community we have. 


my replies to some of the issues raised in this thread:

- gmane.org is great. i still read my main mailing lists via a mail reader,
   but i read some lists i follow less thoroughly via gmane's news 
   interface, and people often refer to gmane's web interface if they

   want to refer to whole threads rather than individual messages.
   no need to change the haskell.org setup - you can already choose!

- haskell-cafe is meant to be the general forum, that shouldn't change.
   but i think there is potential to spin off one or two more specialist
   lists (not too many, or they'll dry out, and not too specific, or they
   won't attract the haskell-cafe style of membership and content; we
   also do not want to start cross-postings to keep the synergies of
   a multitopic forum). 

   the most obvious one being 'haskell-performance' for shootout 
   entries, 'how do i improve this?', 'what is wrong here?', and 'why
   isn't haskell slow?' style of questions, profiling, spacetime leaks, 
   compiler benchmarks, optimizations, transformations, 
   representations, libs, tools, papers, etc. 

   another possible candidate, judging from mails and blog postings, 
   might be 'haskell-math', for numeric and algebra libs, apps, tools,
   classes, theory, and math-related algorithms and data structures, 
   and general discussions.


- with higher volume, the style of messages sometimes reminds me 
   more of newsgroup postings than of a mailinglist. but there are

   several hard-earned lessons from newsgroup experience:

   - don't try to police threads, unless you're willing to go to a
   fully moderated forum (which is exactly what -cafe isn't).
   it tends to be ineffective, and often counterproductive wrt
   to the general feel of the forum and the number of messages

   - you cannot manage volume by adding messages. there are
   only two things you can do with a thread you don't like:
   do not add to it, and ignore it

   - there are lots of faq, and it sometimes feels as if a question
   has just been answered when a newcomer asks it again!-)

   but unless you have a faq you can point to that comes
   very close to providing the answer, there is nothing you
   can do about that. the wiki is evolving, and i hope that
   the search engine fixes that have ben applied to robots.txt
   will ultimately make its contents easier to find. but if you
   want to avoid answering questions again and again on the
   list, you need to improve the cache of answers.

   personally, i tend to be more willing to answer questions
   on the list than to fiddle with wiki markup and conventions,
   but there is no reason why people who are happier with
   wiki editing cannot extract content from list answers to the
   wiki, especially if its a faq answer rather than a research
   result. memoization, organization and generation of answers
   do not all have to be done by the same set of persons.

   once there is a useful collection of faq answers, it should
   be made easier to find: the default signature of -cafe mails
   should be augmented to include pointers to:

   http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Category:FAQ
   http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Category:Glossary

   doing so should soon lead to useful results when googling
   for 'haskell faq', as well. note how one of these is rather 
   less exhaustive than one would expect, given the number 
   of faqs.. faq should include pointers to the list of mailing

   lists, the lists and repos of libraries, the language spec,
   list of tutorials, papers, tools, and implementations, and 
   to the guide about homework questions, among the 
   obvious technical answers.
   
   there is also the registration message, which could point
   to a wiki page dedicated to mailinglist newcomers and 
   their most likely information needs. which should be

   crosslinked with the faq answers.

well, enough additional traffic for now..:-)

claus

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RE: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Philippa Cowderoy]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

 We need at least one forum in which it's acceptable to ask anything, no 
 matter how naive, and get polite replies.  (RTFM isn't polite; but The 
 answer is supposed to be documented here (\url); let us know if that 
 doesn't answer your qn is fine.)  I'd be sorry to lose that.
 

Agreed. That said, it might be worth developing a scary maths FAQ that's 
an explanation largely of why all the maths and why it may irritate a lot 
of people to get in a flap about it all. It seems to come up increasingly 
often, and... well, it's not just the community being elitist or shutting 
people out!

-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

The task of the academic is not to scale great
intellectual mountains, but to flatten them.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

claus.reinke:
 
personally, i tend to be more willing to answer questions
on the list than to fiddle with wiki markup and conventions,
but there is no reason why people who are happier with
wiki editing cannot extract content from list answers to the
wiki, especially if its a faq answer rather than a research
result. 

I've got a few tools that make wiki editing easier (shortcuts to open up
a new wiki page for editing in vim, syntax highlighting, console
access). These make wiki editing roughly as cheap as composing an email.

I tried an experiment this week of just taking someone's post (Conor's idiom
brackets), and putting directly on the wiki first, then letting the
author know that's happened.

How do people feel about allowing posts in -cafe to be placed on the
wiki, without extensive prior negotiation? What copyright do -cafe@
posts have?

If there was a rough consensus that this is ok, we could probably get a
lot more material directly on the wiki, since I for one would act first,
putting some interesting Clause Reinke posts there semi-verbatim, rather
than pondering whether to write an email to the author to seek
permission, or cojole them into doing it.

Should we feel free to put mailing list material onto the wiki?

-- Don
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi


I tried an experiment this week of just taking someone's post (Conor's idiom
brackets), and putting directly on the wiki first, then letting the
author know that's happened.

How do people feel about allowing posts in -cafe to be placed on the
wiki, without extensive prior negotiation? What copyright do -cafe@
posts have?


If you email to a public mailing list, you clearly don't have a
problem with verbatim copying, since you already know its going to
appear in loads of different archives. You also don't have a problem
with selected copying, because quoting is how mailing lists work. I'd
just assume that all posts to haskell-cafe are for the good of
mankind, and then let them be reused at will.


Should we feel free to put mailing list material onto the wiki?


Yes!

Some people do email this list with disclaimers such as if this email
was not specifically addressed to you, and you accidentally remember
something from it, we reserve the right to lobotomise you at a future
date - but I think usually those are company policy rather than
personal choice.

Thanks

Neil
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Philippa Cowderoy]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:

 How do people feel about allowing posts in -cafe to be placed on the
 wiki, without extensive prior negotiation? What copyright do -cafe@
 posts have?
 

Currently, snagging the whole post for non-archive purposes isn't 
necessarily legit.

 If there was a rough consensus that this is ok, we could probably get a
 lot more material directly on the wiki, since I for one would act first,
 putting some interesting Clause Reinke posts there semi-verbatim, rather
 than pondering whether to write an email to the author to seek
 permission, or cojole them into doing it.
 

General is it okay if I put your interesting stuff up? permission works.

So does linking to existing archives.

-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

There is no magic bullet. There are, however, plenty of bullets that
magically home in on feet when not used in exactly the right circumstances.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Lutz Donnerhacke]

* Malcolm Wallace wrote:
 If anything, Usenet is even worse than mailing lists for volume,
 especially of spam.  Also, very few sites maintain their nntp servers
 adequately these days - e.g.  comp.lang.haskell has never made it to
 where I work.

I beg to differ. Of course, I'm an Usenet admin and involved in Usenet
administration since years.

Saing no Usenet is usually a sign of the famous not invented here
syndrom. I'd sugest to keep the 30+ years experience with large volume
distributed mass communication, instead of throwing good and infrastructure
and user interfaces away.

Wikis, Webformus and a lot of other Web 2.0 hypes are doomed to redo every
mistake which is solved since 20+ years.

MMDV.
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RE: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

|  Very timely! It's sad that haskell-cafe has so much noise now.
|
| I disagree with that characterisation. I don't mean to be pedantic, but
| I don't think haskell-cafe has lots of noise. I think it has lots of
| signal! Quite different.
|
| We don't have a problem (in my perception, at least) with the quality of
| either posts of responses. Not a general one, anyway. The only problem
| is that the volume is increasing; which is a problem if that makes it
| hard for valuable contributors to keep contributing

FWIW I agree with Jules's response here.  Yes, the traffic is increasing, but 
much of it is in long threads with multiple response, and email readers are 
good at letting you skip that if you don't want to read it.  Furthermore, we 
have the much-lower-bandwidth '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' list, for those who want to 
see announcements and discussion starters, but don't want the full haskell-cafe 
experience.

We need at least one forum in which it's acceptable to ask anything, no matter 
how naive, and get polite replies.  (RTFM isn't polite; but The answer is 
supposed to be documented here (\url); let us know if that doesn't answer your 
qn is fine.)   I'd be sorry to lose that.

Simon
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jim Burton]

Jules Bean wrote:
 
 Jim Burton wrote:
 Very timely! It's sad that haskell-cafe has so much noise now.
 
 I disagree with that characterisation. I don't mean to be pedantic, but 
 I don't think haskell-cafe has lots of noise. I think it has lots of 
 signal! Quite different.
 
 
I think you're right actually. I was exaggerating the problem due to having
woken up as a bad tempered spartan.


 [...]
 
   One way of protecting the community is to protect this list from
 drowning
   in noise and being a bit rough with newbies who don't do any research
 at
   all before asking is perfectly acceptable in my view.
 
 I disagree with that on two separate levels:
 
 (a) I don't think being rough with newbies is the right response.
 (b) I also don't think it would achieve the goal you state. Being rough 
 with one newbie will not, in my experience, particularly prevent the 
 next question asked by the next newbie :)
 
 All IMHO, obviously.
 
 Jules
 
 
You notice I said people who do no research at all? It might be unfriendly
and counter to the way things happen here, but I think the most helpful
response is to tell them to do some research.

-- 
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jules Bean]

Malcolm Wallace wrote:

Yes, the sheer volume of posts is definitely becoming a problem (for me,
at least).  All your suggestions for keeping the community polite and
helpful are good.  But I wonder if there are also any useful technical
tips for users like myself, who would like to be able to keep up, but
feel they are gradually drowning?


Non-specific, I'm afraid, but technical advice:

Get a decent mailreader, and learn how to use it well. Spending two 
hours or so learning the keybindings/advanced features of your mail 
reader will pay itself back 100 times over.


Some people find that news readers are better than mail readers (really 
this is a feature of the programs, not the protocols; but they the 
programs tend to have different emphases). I believe the folks at gmane 
have setup a working two-way mail to news gateways for the haskell lists.


Most people find it good to have a threading feature. (A few people have 
broken email clients which break threads when they reply, fortunately 
not too many on this list. If you're one of them, please fix it!). 
Couple this with the ability to either 'really delete', or just 'hide' a 
thread from view if it's not interesting to you and you start to work 
through the volume.


It's stupid, but the the single feature that helps mail reading for me 
most of all is simply the fact that SPACE doubles up as 'page down in 
this email' and 'advance to next email in thread'. You can get through 
messages very fast this way.


I use thunderbird, FWIW. And I don't think it's a panacea, but it works 
for me. In the past I've used mutt with some success. The emacs-based 
mailreaders are very powerful, but you will need to spend some time 
learning the keys. There are plenty of other mail readers out there. 
(Mind you, some of them are truly dire).


Jules


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Felipe Almeida Lessa]

Besides traffic, which is something I'm quite used to (try to read the
Python mailing list), I think dons made a quite good point.

On 7/12/07, Donald Bruce Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

That is, to help people progress from newbie, to intermediate, to
expert, and thus ensure the culture is maintained (avoiding `Eternal
September'). This graphic[1] sums the main issue up nicely, in my view:

http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/buildingausercommunity.jpg


I consider myself an intermediate-going-to-advanced Haskeller. I mean,
I can go on with my own legs most of time, even if that means to read
a couple of times some good papers on the subject, so I don't need to
ask lots of questions on the list. OTOH, I also rarely feel confident
to give some answer that I know. Mostly because I only *feel* that I
know -- however I'm not certain of that -- and sometimes because I
think that I can't give the complete answer -- so I leave it to
someone else.

So from now on I'll try to answer more times. But, anyway, that's a
big problem. I'm not the only one on this situation. And probably
there'll always be someone. Dons' tips are really nice (i.e.
necessary), but I wonder if they are sufficient.

Cheers,

--
Felipe.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Dougal Stanton]

On 13/07/07, Jim Burton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


As well as being nice, can't you sometimes tell people to RTFM? Or,
You've asked that before, or That's an FAQ, search the archive?


I suppose you could, but speaking as someone who doesn't know much but
tries to answer questions when he does know - I would feel put off
from answering questions in that case. If the easy questions become
second-class citizens, I would be less likely to answer them. I don't
want to give the impression that *I* am encouraging the degeneration
of the list.

So I would vote for only saying read the manual/FAQ/etc after the
question has been answered. (That being said, I can never find what
I'm looking for on the Haskell wiki; and as mentioned in other threads
Google doesn't index it. So finding the relevant answers can be
tricky.)

Cheers,

Dougal
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jim Burton]

Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
 
 As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:
 
 [...]
 
 * Give tips on how to answer questions
 
 Answering politely, and in detail, explaining common
 misunderstandings
 is better than one word replies.
 
 
 * Adopt a near-zero-tolerance Be Nice policy when people answer
 questions
 
 We are very good here already, both on email and IRC.
 
 
Very timely! It's sad that haskell-cafe has so much noise now. I haven't
been around very long at all but it has gone downhill dramatically even in
the last 6 months (I think I could put a date on it but lets not get into
that). As well as being nice, can't you sometimes tell people to RTFM? Or,
You've asked that before, or That's an FAQ, search the archive? One way of
protecting the community is to protect this list from drowning in noise and
being a bit rough with newbies who don't do any research at all before
asking is perfectly acceptable in my view. It goes without saying that
everything you say about the quality of the help here is true but I don't
think you should treat us with kid gloves. 

-- 
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http://www.nabble.com/Maintaining-the-community-tf4071917.html#a11576127
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Ian Lynagh]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 09:35:09AM +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
 
 Yes, the sheer volume of posts is definitely becoming a problem (for me,
 at least).

The Haskell lists are quite peculiarly named; the haskell@ list is
pretty much what would be haskell-announce@ anywhere else, and
haskell-cafe@ what would be haskell@ elsewhere. A haskell-cafe@ list
elsewhere would probably be where the haskell@ people discuss things
which aren't actually related to Haskell (like e.g. the demon.local
newsgroup). I think the number of posts in the wrong place would be
lower if these were more conventionally named (although there aren't a
lot of them anyway).

I think it would make sense to:

* Rename haskell@ to haskell-announce@, and redirect mails from haskell@
  to haskell-announce@ for some period.

* After that, rename haskell-cafe@ to haskell@ in a similar manner.

* At any point, create [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  This would have the advantage that people might not be so intimidated
  at making their first post here, and posts wouldn't be answered with
  category theory or scary type extensions.
  The disadvantages are that it makes an artificial barrier (when is
  someone ready to post to haskell@ instead?) and it doesn't split the
  discussion up by topic (if you want to see all the discussion about X,
  you need to follow both lists so you have the same amount of mail to
  read).
  I'm not sure if this is a good idea.

* At any point, create topic-specific lists, e.g. a list for discussion
  type system extensions (not sure if that's a good one, as often an
  extension is the /answer/ to a question how do I do foo?).
  This needs people to work out which lists would allow us to make a
  significant dent to the haskell-cafe traffic.


Thanks
Ian, also drowning

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Lutz Donnerhacke]

* Magnus Therning wrote:
 One obvious solution is to split the list into several, more specialised
 lists.  It's far from obvious, at least to me, how to do that with this
 list though.

Switch to Usenet. The new haskell group will die, if the traffic will not
increase.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Magnus Therning]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 09:35:09 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Donald Bruce Stewart) writes:

 As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:
 
 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png
 
 with nearly 2000 (!) people reading haskell-cafe@, perhaps its time to
 think some more about how to build and maintain this lovely Haskell
 community we have.

Yes, the sheer volume of posts is definitely becoming a problem (for
me, at least).  All your suggestions for keeping the community polite
and helpful are good.  But I wonder if there are also any useful
technical tips for users like myself, who would like to be able to keep
up, but feel they are gradually drowning?

One obvious solution is to split the list into several, more specialised
lists.  It's far from obvious, at least to me, how to do that with this
list though.

Personally I try to read the first post in every conversation thread.
If it doesn't grab be then I delete the whole thread.  Not an ideal
strategy, but it helps me keeping my day job ;-)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://therning.org/magnus


pgpwDnERALoFN.pgp
Description: PGP signature
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Malcolm Wallace]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Donald Bruce Stewart) writes:

 As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:
 
 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png
 
 with nearly 2000 (!) people reading haskell-cafe@, perhaps its time to
 think some more about how to build and maintain this lovely Haskell
 community we have.

Yes, the sheer volume of posts is definitely becoming a problem (for me,
at least).  All your suggestions for keeping the community polite and
helpful are good.  But I wonder if there are also any useful technical
tips for users like myself, who would like to be able to keep up, but
feel they are gradually drowning?

Regards,
Malcolm
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Malcolm Wallace]

Lutz Donnerhacke [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Switch to Usenet. The new haskell group will die, if the traffic will
 not increase.

If anything, Usenet is even worse than mailing lists for volume,
especially of spam.  Also, very few sites maintain their nntp servers
adequately these days - e.g.  comp.lang.haskell has never made it to
where I work.

Regards,
Malcolm
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Thorkil Naur]

Hello,

On Friday 13 July 2007 16:45, Ian Lynagh wrote:
 ...
 * At any point, create [EMAIL PROTECTED]
   This would have the advantage that people might not be so intimidated
   at making their first post here, and posts wouldn't be answered with
   category theory or scary type extensions.
   The disadvantages are that it makes an artificial barrier (when is
   someone ready to post to haskell@ instead?) 

Just an idea: How about haskell-first-post@ to encourage the second post to go 
to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or is that too dictator-like?

   ...
   I'm not sure if this is a good idea. 

I'm not sure either ...

 ...

Best regards
Thorkil
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jonathan Cast]

On Friday 13 July 2007, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
 claus.reinke:
 personally, i tend to be more willing to answer questions
 on the list than to fiddle with wiki markup and conventions,
 but there is no reason why people who are happier with
 wiki editing cannot extract content from list answers to the
 wiki, especially if its a faq answer rather than a research
 result.

 I've got a few tools that make wiki editing easier (shortcuts to open up
 a new wiki page for editing in vim, syntax highlighting, console
 access). These make wiki editing roughly as cheap as composing an email.

 I tried an experiment this week of just taking someone's post (Conor's
 idiom brackets), and putting directly on the wiki first, then letting the
 author know that's happened.

 How do people feel about allowing posts in -cafe to be placed on the
 wiki, without extensive prior negotiation?

Well, anything /I/ write is OK. . .

 What copyright do -cafe@ 
 posts have?

Legally?  I'd imagine it's pretty restrictive; morally, I think we should 
encourage people to wave whatever rights they have (like with the wiki).

 If there was a rough consensus that this is ok, we could probably get a
 lot more material directly on the wiki, since I for one would act first,
 putting some interesting Clause Reinke posts there semi-verbatim, rather
 than pondering whether to write an email to the author to seek
 permission, or cojole them into doing it.

 Should we feel free to put mailing list material onto the wiki?

We should.  We may not, yet, but that should change.

Jonathan Cast
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-core
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-emacs
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Thorkil Naur]

Hello,

On Friday 13 July 2007 17:08, Neil Mitchell wrote:
 Hi
 
   * At any point, create [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 This would have the advantage that people might not be so intimidated
 at making their first post here, and posts wouldn't be answered with
 category theory or scary type extensions.
 The disadvantages are that it makes an artificial barrier (when is
 someone ready to post to haskell@ instead?)
 
  Just an idea: How about haskell-first-post@ to encourage the second post 
to go
  to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or is that too dictator-like?
 
 Why not [EMAIL PROTECTED], for people who aren't using Haskell to
 do things, but are working through tutorials.

The idea with haskell-first-post@ would be to make it extremely easy for 
people to select which list to post to. For example, with a learning list, 
I would be uncertain myself. Whether it would also be easy for answerers to 
figure out how to behave, I don't know. In any case, it is important (as 
others have also said) not to lose the situation that mixes new-comers with 
experts.

 A number of questions 
 relate directly to books such as SOE, and these could be easily
 answered there.
 
 Thanks
 
 Neil
 

Best regards
Thorkil
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi


 * At any point, create [EMAIL PROTECTED]
   This would have the advantage that people might not be so intimidated
   at making their first post here, and posts wouldn't be answered with
   category theory or scary type extensions.
   The disadvantages are that it makes an artificial barrier (when is
   someone ready to post to haskell@ instead?)

Just an idea: How about haskell-first-post@ to encourage the second post to go
to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or is that too dictator-like?


Why not [EMAIL PROTECTED], for people who aren't using Haskell to
do things, but are working through tutorials. A number of questions
relate directly to books such as SOE, and these could be easily
answered there.

Thanks

Neil
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[brad clawsie]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 02:30:49AM -0700, Jim Burton wrote:
 Very timely! It's sad that haskell-cafe has so much noise now. I haven't
 been around very long at all but it has gone downhill dramatically even in
 the last 6 months

just look for the date of my first post...

to improve the list, might i suggest

- push chatter to IRC

- take this service off of email entirely. try a web forum system (you
  may have to slum it and use php). i don't recommend nntp, that just
  forces us to use gmane since very few isps provide nntp now. a web
  forum would allow you to segment interest sections while retaining a
  global search etc. if you use code like slash, you can just moderate
  noise makers off the page. you can set up a yahoo group in ten minutes.

- just get used to noise if indeed you want haskell to grow in
  popularity. use digest-mode, read on gmane, or use client email
  filters to remove individual noise generators

- please don't split the lists, people will still just email cafe
  anyway, and it causes tension when a moderator-type continually asks
  them to take the issue to haskell-*

- in the worst case, get volunteer moderators to filter submissions to
  the list. this will reduce traffic dramatically but also remove the
  immediacy of direct email. a web forum would probably be easier.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Conor McBride]

Hi Don

On 13 Jul 2007, at 14:47, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:

I tried an experiment this week of just taking someone's post  
(Conor's idiom

brackets), and putting directly on the wiki first, then letting the
author know that's happened.


Seemed entirely reasonable to me. If I have a spare moment, I might  
even finally get around to registering so I can add the other thing I  
usually bundle (for inserting effectful computations which don't  
contribute an argument to the main function).


 data Ig  =  Ig

 instance Idiomatic i f g  = Idiomatic i f (Ig - i x - g) where
   idiomatic fi Ig xi  = idiomatic (fi * xi)

so that   iI f a Ig (putStrLn Boo!) b Ii
isdo {a' - a; putStrLn Boo!; b' - b; return (f a b)}

If I'm writing for a mailing list, I'm certainly willing (if  
surprised) to be exploited in this way.


If there is any legalistic need for explicit permission, then we  
should have a permanent permission system on an opt-in basis, perhaps  
recorded in some suitable central and accessible place (like,  
erm, ...). I'm in.


Cheers

Conor

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Philippa Cowderoy]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, brad clawsie wrote:

 to improve the list, might i suggest
 
 - push chatter to IRC
 

This is problematic for some kinds of techie chatter, where email makes it 
easier to get all the maths down.

 - take this service off of email entirely. try a web forum system (you
   may have to slum it and use php). i don't recommend nntp, that just
   forces us to use gmane since very few isps provide nntp now. a web
   forum would allow you to segment interest sections while retaining a
   global search etc. if you use code like slash, you can just moderate
   noise makers off the page. you can set up a yahoo group in ten minutes.
 

A global search might be an idea to add to our existing archives, 
otherwise I'm still not convinced.

-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Society does not owe people jobs.
Society owes it to itself to find people jobs.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Nicolas Frisby]

Perhaps an information retrieval pipedream, but what if we attempted
an automated FAQ answerer? I'm sure some keywords pop-up often enough
in certain chunks of first posts (heterogenous lists, existential
error messages, SOE and graphics, category functor monad, etc). It
could respond with the standard links to the Wiki pages and research
papers.

Of course we would want to keep it on a leash for a while during
training and taming.

If we integrate it with the list, it might even belay the list
message, giving the user a chance to read its response before
selecting:
* not quite helpful, send to list anyway
* never send me this rubbish again
Or we could avoid such invasive methods all together and just
auto-post a rather comprehensive answer.

Just a neat thought -- and another potentially nifty and well-sought
tool written in Haskell.

On 7/13/07, Philippa Cowderoy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, brad clawsie wrote:

 to improve the list, might i suggest

 - push chatter to IRC


This is problematic for some kinds of techie chatter, where email makes it
easier to get all the maths down.

 - take this service off of email entirely. try a web forum system (you
   may have to slum it and use php). i don't recommend nntp, that just
   forces us to use gmane since very few isps provide nntp now. a web
   forum would allow you to segment interest sections while retaining a
   global search etc. if you use code like slash, you can just moderate
   noise makers off the page. you can set up a yahoo group in ten minutes.


A global search might be an idea to add to our existing archives,
otherwise I'm still not convinced.

--
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Society does not owe people jobs.
Society owes it to itself to find people jobs.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Nicolas Frisby]

FYI, Gmail *can* kill threads, the Geniuses just deemed it unworthy of
a UI presence. This is news to me and related to earlier comments in
this thread. HTH

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=enanswer=47787

On 7/13/07, Nicolas Frisby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Perhaps an information retrieval pipedream, but what if we attempted
an automated FAQ answerer? I'm sure some keywords pop-up often enough
in certain chunks of first posts (heterogenous lists, existential
error messages, SOE and graphics, category functor monad, etc). It
could respond with the standard links to the Wiki pages and research
papers.

Of course we would want to keep it on a leash for a while during
training and taming.

If we integrate it with the list, it might even belay the list
message, giving the user a chance to read its response before
selecting:
 * not quite helpful, send to list anyway
 * never send me this rubbish again
Or we could avoid such invasive methods all together and just
auto-post a rather comprehensive answer.

Just a neat thought -- and another potentially nifty and well-sought
tool written in Haskell.

On 7/13/07, Philippa Cowderoy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, brad clawsie wrote:

  to improve the list, might i suggest
 
  - push chatter to IRC
 

 This is problematic for some kinds of techie chatter, where email makes it
 easier to get all the maths down.

  - take this service off of email entirely. try a web forum system (you
may have to slum it and use php). i don't recommend nntp, that just
forces us to use gmane since very few isps provide nntp now. a web
forum would allow you to segment interest sections while retaining a
global search etc. if you use code like slash, you can just moderate
noise makers off the page. you can set up a yahoo group in ten minutes.
 

 A global search might be an idea to add to our existing archives,
 otherwise I'm still not convinced.

 --
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 Society does not owe people jobs.
 Society owes it to itself to find people jobs.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Malcolm Wallace]

Ian Lynagh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 I think the number of posts in the wrong place would be
 lower if these were more conventionally named (although there aren't a
 lot of them anyway).

There are very few inappropriate posts to the haskell@ list.
I very much doubt that the list names are a problem.

 * At any point, create [EMAIL PROTECTED]

This would pretty-much guarantee that no-one with the necessary
expertise to answer questions was actually listening to them.  :-(

Regards,
Malcolm
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[James Britt]

Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
 As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:

 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png

 with nearly 2000 (!) people reading haskell-cafe@, perhaps its time to
 think some more about how to build and maintain this lovely Haskell
 community we have. Just yesterday I received an email:

 I posted it to Haskell-Cafe and received loads of brilliant
 responses. Wow, those guys are awesome. I'm definitely going to
 learn Haskell now.

 Which is *exactly* the kind of (view of the) community we want to build
 and encourage, so we can keep the Haskell project growing into the
 future.

Hear, hear.

I'm a Haskell newbie.  I've not posted much, but my copy of The Haskell 
School of Expression just arrived from Amazon, and I'm stoked.



 I think the main thing we need to remember is to help train new experts
 in the community, to be fluent in the culture, ensuring that expertise
 and a knowledge of the culture diffuses through the new people arriving.


All important.

I've spent a fair amount of time in the Ruby community.  I got started 
on Ruby around 2001, and found the community welcoming and helpful, even 
when I was asking what were likely many dopey questions.


The general climate was sufficient to make me want to be more involved; 
I went and started ruby-doc.org to do my share to help the community 
grow, and tried to stay active on Ruby lists to help others as I had 
been helped.  This was quite different from my experiences when learning 
other languages. To be fair, I don't really recall to what extent I was 
using  Usenet and discussion groups when learning Perl, PHP, or Java, 
but I don't think there was the same emphasis on niceness and the 
promotion of an explicit community culture.



I think Haskell has a reputation for being hard, of being a dense, 
academic, egghead language. In short, it's scary.  The more people who 
try it who can report good responses from the community and code success 
stories the more people there will be who can help each batch of newcomers.



Thanks,


James Britt

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrea Rossato]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 12:11:58PM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
 As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:
 
 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png
 
[..]
 That is, to help people progress from newbie, to intermediate, to
 expert, and thus ensure the culture is maintained (avoiding `Eternal
 September'). This graphic[1] sums the main issue up nicely, in my view:
 
 
 http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/buildingausercommunity.jpg

I feel somehow in the Nothing area and I feel somehow ashamed for
that: I used to ask a lot when I was a newbie, but now I'm not
answering very much. I ask some questions sometimes, and that's it.

At first, when I was learning, I tried to help others who seemed even
more novice then I was, but usually the experts used to jump in, and
show, with their wonderfully conceived examples, how basically
ridiculous my code was and how many better ways there are to do
things. I did not want to sound clever, and, moreover, I was just
trying to make my code as simple as clear as I, newbie, I would have
wanted to see. Nevertheless it's not very rewarding to publicly face
your ignorance at ever single message you dare to send. So you just
quit.

Now, I'm telling this because I believe that the expert ones are in
part responsible for the gap the picture shows. But only when I'll be
an expert I'll be able to prove that. In the meanwhile I'd better shut
up!
;-)

Just my 2 cents.

all the best,
andrea
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Dan Weston]

The following recent reply from Dave Bayer is IMHO nearly optimal for 
Maintaining the Community, and I applaud him for it:


Dave Bayer wrote:
 [someone] writes:

 So what the hell is the difference between them?  Int and Integer.
 They aren't synonyms clearly.  What's going on?

 http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Learn_Haskell_in_10_minutes

 is a good starting point for answering this and similar questions.

0) The question that was actually asked was answered, saving follow-on 
frustration, discouragement, and noise. The experience level of the 
answer matches the (inferred) experience level of the question.


1) The provocative word hell is appropriately ignored without comment, 
allowing leeway for occasional frustration, especially from newbies.


2) No assumption was made that the person who posed the question was 
being lazy, stupid, or acting in bad faith.


3) A useful link was provided to enable the questioner to answer his own 
question without excess frustration, and without the useless that was 
already answered in a previous e-mail (but who knew? I just joined the 
list...) was not deployed.


4) The last line pleasantly (read: effectively) encouraged optimal 
future interaction. The inevitably irritating phrase Next time, was 
wonderfully avoided.


5) Phrases like of course, wild guess, why don't you, if you 
just, next time, before you do ..., that provide only heat without 
light were not deployed in arrogance or anger.


Dan Weston

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

brad clawsie wrote:

to improve the list, might i suggest

- push chatter to IRC

- take this service off of email entirely. try a web forum system (you
  may have to slum it and use php). i don't recommend nntp, that just
  forces us to use gmane since very few isps provide nntp now.
  


Just curiose, but... what does NNTP have to do with your ISP?

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Mark T.B. Carroll]

Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Just curiose, but... what does NNTP have to do with your ISP?

Someone has to provide an NNTP server for your client to connect to.
Many ISPs don't. Things like gmane can be used, of course. Some of
the free ones can be okay. I like http://news.individual.net/ who,
while not free, are pretty cheap, and they carry comp.lang.haskell.

-- Mark

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Mark T.B. Carroll]

Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Mark T.B. Carroll wrote:
 Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
   
 Just curiose, but... what does NNTP have to do with your ISP?

 Someone has to provide an NNTP server for your client to connect to.
 Many ISPs don't. Things like gmane can be used, of course. Some of
 the free ones can be okay. I like http://news.individual.net/ who,
 while not free, are pretty cheap, and they carry comp.lang.haskell.

 ...and when you view a web page, your web browser has to connect to a 
 web server somewhere.

 I don't see your point...

Very many news servers will only serve news to people on the network of
whoever's running the server: i.e. a rather restricted 'customer' base.
If your ISP doesn't provide a decent NNTP server, you have to find one
of the less discriminating servers, and there aren't many good ones
around that will serve news to just anyone.

Mark

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

Mark T.B. Carroll wrote:

Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

  

...and when you view a web page, your web browser has to connect to a
web server somewhere.

I don't see your point...



Very many news servers will only serve news to people on the network of
whoever's running the server: i.e. a rather restricted 'customer' base.
  


Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody. (Unless 
it's *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody 
would configure their NNTP server differently...


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jens Fisseler]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Andrew Coppin wrote:

 Mark T.B. Carroll wrote:
  Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 

   ...and when you view a web page, your web browser has to connect to a
   web server somewhere.
  
   I don't see your point...
   
 
  Very many news servers will only serve news to people on the network of
  whoever's running the server: i.e. a rather restricted 'customer' base.

 
 Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody. (Unless it's
 *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody would configure
 their NNTP server differently...

That's probably because someone has to pay for maintenance. Most of the 
time, this will be the one who is running the server. So, if *you* were 
running a NNTP server and had to pay monthly fees and other recurring 
costs, whom would you grant access to your NNTP server?

With web servers, you, as the reader or consumer, don't have to pay for 
the access, because the owner of the web server takes care of these costs, 
because he/she probably gains some sort of benefit from this.

Regards,

Jens
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RE: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Re, Joseph (IT)]

Perhaps I haven't found the amazing treasure trove of open NNTP servers
you appear to have, but in my experience I've yet to find a single good
(read: access to most groups and quick about it) and free NNTP server
(read: not from my ISP, employer, or university - which, if provided at
all, have always been quite limited in which groups they serve), so I
can completely understand where the others are coming from in this
regard.  Perhaps those of you who have found good, free NNTP servers
would care to share these well kept secrets?

-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Coppin
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2007 5:04 PM
To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

Mark T.B. Carroll wrote:
 Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

   
 ...and when you view a web page, your web browser has to connect to a

 web server somewhere.

 I don't see your point...
 

 Very many news servers will only serve news to people on the network 
 of whoever's running the server: i.e. a rather restricted 'customer'
base.
   

Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody. (Unless
it's *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody
would configure their NNTP server differently...

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Anthony Chaumas-Pellet]

From: Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody. (Unless 
 it's *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody 
 would configure their NNTP server differently...

The scale of an NNTP server is simply a *lot* bigger than most web
servers, where you only need as much storage capacity and bandwidth as
you have content to offer.

Daily traffic on the whole of the Usenet takes up a few terabytes, and
you presumably want to store more than one day worth of Usenet
traffic. You also need to keep in sync with the other Usenet servers,
as you are not the sole provider of content.

So, NNTP servers need to be powerhouses if they hope to serve even
part of the Usenet, and they're closer to search engines than to HTTP
servers in terms of the resources required.

(For what it's worth, my ISP uses a high-end, dedicated NNTP provider
for their Usenet service. For a regular user, it actually costs more
to subscribe to that NTTP server alone than to my ISP. Unsurprisingly,
my ISP only authorizes its own users to access that particular
service.)

Anthony Chaumas-Pellet
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Derek Elkins]

On Fri, 2007-07-13 at 14:33 +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:
  As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:
  
 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png
  
  with nearly 2000 (!) people reading haskell-cafe@, perhaps its time to
  think some more about how to build and maintain this lovely Haskell
  community we have. 

 - haskell-cafe is meant to be the general forum, that shouldn't change.
 but i think there is potential to spin off one or two more specialist
 lists (not too many, or they'll dry out, and not too specific, or they
 won't attract the haskell-cafe style of membership and content; we
 also do not want to start cross-postings to keep the synergies of
 a multitopic forum). 
 
 the most obvious one being 'haskell-performance' for shootout 
 entries, 'how do i improve this?', 'what is wrong here?', and 'why
 isn't haskell slow?' style of questions, profiling, spacetime leaks, 
 compiler benchmarks, optimizations, transformations, 
 representations, libs, tools, papers, etc. 

I really like this. ^

 another possible candidate, judging from mails and blog postings, 
 might be 'haskell-math', for numeric and algebra libs, apps, tools,
 classes, theory, and math-related algorithms and data structures, 
 and general discussions.

This I'm much much less certain or keen about.  Most such questions
start as legitimate Haskell questions.  Furthermore, I think the replies
are often helpful to people who probably wouldn't subscribe to a
'haskell-math' list. (Still it would be nice to have such a venue to
just talk about the relation between Haskell and math.)  I don't think
almost anyone has a problem with such discussions and it seems that many
non-theoretical readers enjoy them.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Jul 13, 2007, at 17:41 , Anthony Chaumas-Pellet wrote:


From: Andrew Coppin [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody.  
(Unless

it's *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody
would configure their NNTP server differently...


The scale of an NNTP server is simply a *lot* bigger than most web
servers, where you only need as much storage capacity and bandwidth as
you have content to offer.


Also, expiring old articles is a very expensive operation.  (Yes, I  
used to run a news server, and monitor CMU ECE's internal server.)


--
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon universityKF8NH


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Claus Reinke]

Perhaps those of you who have found good, free NNTP servers
would care to share these well kept secrets?


have you tried gmane.org? http://gmane.org/about.php

http://news.gmane.org/search.php?match=haskell

(there's nntp://news.gmane.org/ and http://news.gmane.org/
among others)

claus

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Michael T. Richter]

On Fri, 2007-13-07 at 12:11 +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:

 * Give tips on how to answer questions
 
 Answering politely, and in detail, explaining common misunderstandings
 is better than one word replies.


I can give one added tip, though, that is an opposing force which has to
be balanced against this in detail meme.  A pattern I see a lot in
computing, but especially in esoteric computing (which Haskell is,
still) is a newcomer asking a question and getting a response from the
community, as the result of continued conversation within it (and not
with said newcomer!), that looks astonishingly like this:


http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html


While it is understandable, given the intense interest most grognards of
any language have in playing with the language, for people to enjoy
conversations that go into the ever-more-esoteric, it is decidedly not
helpful to the newcomer striving to understand things.  So yes:  Answer
politely.  Explain your answer in detail suited to the perceived level
of the asker.  Clear common misunderstandings.  But do not use this as a
launchpad into the geek equivalent of language knowledge oneupmanship.
It confuses far more than it helps.  If you really need to enter into
the game, branch out.  Don't even reply to the thread but start a new
thread with your reply.  Leave the newcomer to the comprehensible side,
even if it is perhaps somehow less than perfect by whatever standards
you choose to measure perfection in.

-- 
Michael T. Richter [EMAIL PROTECTED] (GoogleTalk:
[EMAIL PROTECTED])
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective
code. (Richard Pattis)


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Michael T. Richter]

On Fri, 2007-13-07 at 20:39 +0200, Andrea Rossato wrote:

  
  http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/buildingausercommunity.jpg



 Now, I'm telling this because I believe that the expert ones are in
 part responsible for the gap the picture shows.


In many ways the experts in any such community (not just the Haskell
one!) are, in fact, to blame for that gap, yes.  The problem is that
they, being the experts, can most quickly and effectively answer the
questions.  And for a while they do (at least subconsciously, but
sometimes overtly) bask in the attention they get as the go-to guy.
The problem with this is twofold:


 1. As you so ably pointed out, they do a disservice to the
intermediates who are sharpening their skills both technical and
pedagogical.  The intermediates shut up and wait for the experts
to answer thus leaving observers of the community thinking
there's really only two or three who really understand the
topic in question.
 2. The experts wear out.  Eventually the attention isn't something
to bask in.  It's to be avoided.  The result is the experts
avoiding places where they're likely to be prevailed upon to
answer questions and, because of the training from #1, nobody is
left behind to fill the resulting gap.


I've seen this pattern so often in communities.  I've also seen it in
management (the supervisor/manager who can do the job better than his
underlings -- so he does) or in teaching (the popular teacher gets a
heavier courseload, in effect being punished for being good) or in a
myriad of other social enterprises.

-- 
Michael T. Richter [EMAIL PROTECTED] (GoogleTalk:
[EMAIL PROTECTED])
A well-designed and humane interface does not need to be split into
beginner and expert subsystems. (Jef Raskin)


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Michael T. Richter]

On Fri, 2007-13-07 at 09:35 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

 But I wonder if there are also any useful technical
 tips for users like myself, who would like to be able to keep up, but
 feel they are gradually drowning?


I have a couple of simple heuristics that are almost universally
applicable to the mailing lists I read or participate in.

1)  The longer the thread, the less likely it is that anything useful
can be found in it.  I tend to read the first, say, five messages in a
thread and then move on unless there's something compelling in what I've
read in the first five messages or it's a topic I'm actively interested
in.
2) Develop a mental list of people who are noise generators for you.
Some people in haskell-cafe, for example, tend to speak miles and miles
over my head.  As I identify them, I tend to just pass over their
messages because they really do just add confusion and noise to my
experience.  There are other kinds of noise-generators too (albeit
thankfully few in this community!).  Same treatment.

-- 
Michael T. Richter [EMAIL PROTECTED] (GoogleTalk:
[EMAIL PROTECTED])
The most exciting phrase to hear in science - the one that heralds new
discoveries - is not Eureka! but That's funny... (Isaac Asimov)


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[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png

with nearly 2000 (!) people reading haskell-cafe@, perhaps its time to
think some more about how to build and maintain this lovely Haskell
community we have. Just yesterday I received an email:

I posted it to Haskell-Cafe and received loads of brilliant
responses. Wow, those guys are awesome. I'm definitely going to
learn Haskell now.

Which is *exactly* the kind of (view of the) community we want to build
and encourage, so we can keep the Haskell project growing into the
future.

I think the main thing we need to remember is to help train new experts
in the community, to be fluent in the culture, ensuring that expertise
and a knowledge of the culture diffuses through the new people arriving.

That is, to help people progress from newbie, to intermediate, to
expert, and thus ensure the culture is maintained (avoiding `Eternal
September'). This graphic[1] sums the main issue up nicely, in my view:

http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/buildingausercommunity.jpg

And the steps to follow (people can think about how best they apply to
them) (also from [1]):


* Encourage newer users--especially those who've been active askers--to
  start trying to answer questions 

We're pretty good with this, but we can be *explicit* about it. If
you're taking a lot from the community, please put a lot back in (in 
terms
of writing about it, contributing answers, new libraries, and so on).

I note this is also exactly what the Summer of Code helps do too --
we've had several people paid to progress from newbie to expert, thanks
to the SoC.


* Give tips on how to answer questions

Answering politely, and in detail, explaining common misunderstandings
is better than one word replies.


* Adopt a near-zero-tolerance Be Nice policy when people answer questions

We are very good here already, both on email and IRC.


* Teach and encourage the more advanced users (including moderators) how to
  correct a wrong answer while maintaining the original answerer's dignity.

This is hard, perhaps people can think some more about this.


* Re-examine your reward/levels strategy for your community

This is also important: on the IRC channel we actually use
participation data 
(http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/irc/haskell-07.html)
to determine who gets moderator privledges. For the community in
general, rewards are along the lines of going to the hackathon,
becoming the domain expert for some library. 


Cheers and happy hacking,
Don

[1]. 
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/how_to_build_a_.html
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