Re: A Philly Lambda Project

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Jonathan Tran <jonnytran@gmail.com> wrote:

Mike D said we should just fight. :-)

I'm only half-joking. I honestly didn't like any of your ideas, hence
I didn't feel united around a single idea. Hence not motivated to
join forces around a project that seems pointless. Hence re-inventing
ICFP.

It's apparent to me that just about any concrete thing other people
come up with, I'm not going to like. And any idea I come up with,
others probably won't like. ...That said, I will do my best to find
that balance and not care too much and just have some fun.

I think the more fun the project is, the more likely people will be to
join in. IDE, compiler, and code analysis tools are definitely
useful, but not all that much fun for people new to it. Your
classifier idea is also very good, but frankly I doubt we could get
much interest in it simply b/c most people wouldn't understand it at
first.

A simple web app, on the other hand, might be more gratifying esp.
since everyone can see it working as soon as it does. I've actually
been toying with the idea of a simple web service for storing files in
the cloud. But we could do something simpler like your to-do list
idea. It might be a good start that we could branch off of later.

I think one of the criteria should be that it's simple enough that we
can have a working prototype in a weekend so that people can start
playing with something. i.e. instant gratification. Plus, others
could re-write it as an exercise in fp if they desired. More features
could always be added later.

Just to throw a few other ideas out there that might be conducive to
functional programming...
- A Map/Reduce library (or some other distributed computing framework)
- A web server
- A Lisp interpreter (or any interpreter for that matter)
- A feed aggregator

... I'll keep thinking of more ideas. But what do you guys think?

+ 1 to A Lisp interpreter (or any interpreter for that matter)
+ 1 to A web server (or any kind of parser)

But it's highly likely the first idea will flop. So be ready with a second, third and forth idea :) Building the momentum to getting people involved is probably more important than the specific project.

- Rob

Jonathan

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Kyle R. Burton <kyle.burton@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Jonathan Tran <jonnytran@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > You're right. I've made the silly mistake of re-inventing the ICFP contest. :-P
>
> If you're joking then good, so was I, hence the '*ducks*'.
>
>
> > Just forget I said anything.
>
> No fscking way - come up with a concrete thing, just as you suggested,
> what meets your criteria of useful? I took a shot at that, it'd be
> cool if you at least evaluated each of those (minus the ICFP) based on
> your criteria.
>
> Kyle
>