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[–]gwern[S] 22 points23 points  (5 children)

Overall, a pretty good year for Haskell.

This will likely be my final year of recording/predicting/judging SoCs. I don't do very much Haskell programming these days and I'm no longer very in sync with the community, so I am both less interested in SoCs than I used to be and less able to subjectively judge their value. There also does not seem to be any particular interest by many people in the topic, so there's no reason to force myself to continue doing it (as I had to this year, delaying initial recording until June or so, much longer than I should've).

I will probably do a last update next year to finalize all judgments, perhaps do a logistic regression to see if Cabal & GHC really are as dangerous as my gut says, and deal with broken links, but otherwise I'm done. (I think the SoC mentors should at least be tracking projects similarly to my page, but if they don't want to, that's their business.)

[–]edwardkmett 23 points24 points  (0 children)

I just want to say that I appreciate all of the effort you've put into this over the years.

Even if I don't always agree with your opinions, I do value them! =)

[–]ndeine 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Another thank you for your contributions. They are highly appreciated. I for one would be interested in statistical analysis of the dangers of GHC/Cabal contributions.

Hopefully someone will take over to work on a SoC 2014 retrospective as well. These things are useful and a nice compilation of ideas whether they are completed or not.

[–]idontgetoutmuch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think you have done a cracking job and really appreciate what you have done for Haskell GSoC. I used your data last year to help put together a proposal. I am sorry you are putting down the baton and also that you don't do much Haskell these days. Hopefully someone else will take this over.

[–]eegreg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the retrospective, I think Haskellers definitely appreciate this. I think you can increase the accuracy of your reporting and reduce time spent on this by contacting the project mentors/students directly rather than googling.

[–]winterkoninkje 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've been very interested in your analyses over the years. Retrospectives like these are an excellent form of feedback on how we're doing and where things need work. But there's always a time to move on

Thanks again for all your work! :)

[–]co_dan 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Hi, Gwern

Haddock patches have been applied and now in HEAD: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2014-January/112207.html

[–]Lossy 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I am interested in applying for Summer of Code this year, what sort of pre-requisites are expected for haskell projects? What is the best way to prepare?

[–]edwardkmett 1 point2 points  (0 children)

what sort of pre-requisites are expected for haskell projects?

Prior experience with Haskell while neither technically necessary or sufficient condition is a strong indicator of the potential for success in a Haskell GSoC project.

What is the best way to prepare?

Join the #haskell-gsoc channel on irc.freenode.net!

In general we've found that to is best to try to find a potential mentor early.

[–]kamatsu 3 points4 points  (5 children)

Some of those project proposals you evaluated must be quite old.

CUDA backend for DPH seems like a terrible idea.

[–]gwern[S] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

Yes, that one was first proposed 6 years ago, according to the bug report timestamp. But two years ago, you thought it was "unnecessary", not "terrible". What's changed?

[–]kamatsu 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Wow, I don't remember writing that post at all. But, it's even more of a bad idea now, because Accelerate is a much more viable option now, and it would be a massive duplication of work to write such a backend for DPH.

[–]sideEffffECt 0 points1 point  (2 children)

DPH supports nested data parallelism, Accelerate does not, afaik

why would it be terrible to have CUDA backed NDP framework?

[–]kamatsu 0 points1 point  (1 child)

NDP support is current work for Accelerate. We hope to have it available in the not-too-distant future.

[–]sideEffffECt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

very well then :)

[–]idontgetoutmuch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It seems a GSoC project which involves modifying ghc has the odds stacked against it?

[–]cultic_raider 0 points1 point  (6 children)

Does GSoC awards make Google one of the major sponsors of open source Haskell?

[–]jpnp 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Well don't forget that Microsoft research support a large amount of the development of one popular open source Haskell implementation.

[–]edwardkmett 0 points1 point  (4 children)

In many ways, yes. The mentoring payments provide the vast majority of what we use to run haskell.org. This was the first year we were actually set up to take donations from other sources through SPI, though, so we'll see how it balances in the future.

[–]hsenag 0 points1 point  (3 children)

We've been able to receive them ever since we joined SPI, but didn't try to encourage them as we had no idea what we might spend the excess money on and there's no point in just accumulating a large bank balance.

Are there some concrete ideas that would benefit from having more money available?

[–]edwardkmett 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That was pretty much where I was going with it. We joined SPI at the very start of 2012, so I guess it has been 2 years now, not just the 1.

There have been several proposals that would increase our burn rate.

Examples off the top of my head based on random proposals or suggestions I've seen:

  • Setting up community build-bot resources. This might be useful for things like helping provide better Windows support.
  • Paying a real sys admin to be more proactive maintaining the servers. That said, Gershom's work in getting more folks involved in server maintenance has gone a long way to reduce pressure in this area.
  • Polling the community for things it wants as a whole that aren't being addressed by the more commercial interests behind the Industrial Haskell Group and funding some development on those through, say, Well-Typed.
  • Switching the server infrastructure around to use a content distribution network to help ensure reliabilty in the face of the occasional denial of service attack, and potentially allow read-only access to things like most of hackage when the backend goes down.
  • As haskell.org represents the open source Haskell community we could also look into helping to fund local Haskell hackathons to help increase adoption and community cohesion. To branch out that far may require a more formal charter and careful consideration, though.

If we had more money available to us there are ways we could put it to work! The trick is nailing down specifics and not over-promising on what we can deliver.

[–]co_dan 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Did donations really generate that much money?

[–]hsenag 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Historically the incoming money was from GSoC, not donations - it's not huge sums, but it's more than was needed for hosting costs which was all it was being spent on.