Re: A Philly Lambda Project

["Jonathan Tran" <jonnytran@gmail.com>]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Andrew Gwozdziewycz <apgwoz@gmail.com> wrote:
> We're getting hung up on which techniques to use? This is just getting odd. I've
> never heard someone say, "I'm going to build an OS so I can figure out how to
> read from a serial port."

I think we're completely not on the same page.  If you want to start a
project for the end product, which would potentially be useful enough
for a business, I would definitely be all for that.  But that wasn't
what I was talking about at all.  I've been trying to say that it's
more difficult to unite people around such a thing.  I thought people
might simply want a project to learn from, teach with, or just have
fun with.

> Toy examples are more than enough to learn concepts.

That's exactly the point.  Toy examples are absolutely _not_ enough to
learn concepts well enough to use them in real situations.  Hence, we
start a project which introduces significant problems to demonstrate
actual use of the concepts.

Think of it more like a project for a college course on functional
programming.  The professor specifically chooses a project b/c he
knows that to do it well, you must employ fp techniques.

We could even write the solutions in multiple languages for
comparison.  Another way of putting it is larger and more practical
projecteuler.net problems that once you've done, you might actually be
able to use for something.

...Of course, if people really want to build something innovative or
potentially useful enough for a business, I'd be all for that.  I just
didn't think there was enough interest in that here.