One item that hasn't made the project ideas list that I've seen numerous threads about is documentation. Does this fall within the scope of GSoC?
It seems like there are a lot of opportunities to either organize, revise, update, or generate documentation. Some ideas: - Clojure.org's Libraries section still talks about contrib like it's first class. - The Getting Started guide could always use more work. - StackOverflow contains nuggets of wisdom that aren't anywhere in official documentation. (It also contains a lot of bad answers, but still…) - I've heard it said on more than one occasion that xyz docstring is out of date. - This is one of the few communities where you can go back to 2008 and read a transcript of a conversation between Chouser and Rich about why map destructuring is the way it is. Some of these conversations hold some deep wisdom about Why Things Are The Way They Are. - This list contains truckloads of information that could be organized for more efficient consumption. - ClojureScript wouldn't be hurt by more documentation. - Without making this a laundry list I'd just say: Producing and organizing good documentation is hard labor, but it is also something that I think benefits the entire community. Moreover, it might give someone a chance to learn a ton about Clojure over the course of a summer, and make it easier on everyone who decides to try out Clojure in the future as a nice side effect. I'd like to suggest we add an intentionally vague option to "Make Lots of Things Better" and list some ideas for how one might go about doing that. More ideas that might bear interesting and desirable fruit: - Make an album with Overtone. (Kidding (but only a little bit (not kidding at all, actually (I bet we'd get some passionate proposals (and maybe even a record deal ;))))) - The sidebar on the left of the GSoC page lists an opening for a Community Manager Internship. I think a lot of what I'm suggesting falls under that umbrella. "creating/editing documentation, helping migrate projects to newer versions of clojure, developing sample applications such as solutions for the alioth benchmarks, answering questions on IRC, administering/maintaing clojure.org, clojure.com, assemble, confluence, mycroft, etc." I guess what I'm saying is, at the end of the day: Let's add documentation to the list, but also add some other obviously fun projects and see what kind of proposals we receive. It doesn't mean we need to accept them, it just shows (IMO) we're very open minded about people who are passionate about building what /they/ care about, not necessarily what we care about. If some musician in grad school submitted a proposal to make an album exclusively with Overtone and published the source that would be a boon to the Overtone project IMO. If a sophomore in college wants to build some crazy parallelized Rube Goldberg machine with Clojure then I think we should at least entertain the idea of it. More than anything, I think we need to present the people who *might* do something like that with the face of a community that would genuinely appreciate it. I've met many of you personally, so I hardly think that's a stretch for us. This is getting really long so I apologize, but I'd like to offer up a bit of personal experience w/r/t GSoC: I did GSoC years ago for Plan9 (Inferno-OS specifically). I was not very familiar with their community, and I doubt many people have ever read a book about programming Limbo. As a result, a lot of the ideas that were listed were strangely specific from my limited undergrad perspective. I was interested in learning about Plan9 and contributing, not necessarily learning Plan9 to make a distributed authentication system that someone else wanted for reasons that were unknown to me and/or were not well described in the description. As a result, keep in mind that we will potentially have people submitting proposals to write Skynet 1.0 in 3 months who are doing their undergrad and may have only just had an introduction to lisp or scheme. Last note (I promise) is: potential mentors, this is not a small commitment. Trust me on that. It's as much your responsibility to steer someone toward success as it is theirs. Regards, '(Devin Walters) On Monday, February 27, 2012 at 7:42 PM, Cedric Greevey wrote: > On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Alexander Yakushev > <yakushev.a...@gmail.com (mailto:yakushev.a...@gmail.com)> wrote: > > On Feb 28, 12:59 am, Cedric Greevey <cgree...@gmail.com (http://gmail.com)> > > wrote: > > > ... > > > > > > Ok, I got the idea now and I for sure understand your frustration with > > Emacs. Emacs is definitely not for the weak of spirit (it's not a pun > > in any way, I just compare your words to my own beginner's > > experiences) requiring you to learn, google and hack a lot to make of > > it an editor you want to use > > > > > Hm. It might not be *quite* as bad nowadays, since now we a) have > google and b) would probably be running Emacs (or connecting to it) in > an emulated terminal in a desktop window with other, more familiar > tools available alongside it, instead of being at a green-glowing > terminal display without any of those resources ... > > Still sounds like more startup work for the newbie than basing it off > another IDE, especially if by "another IDE" is meant "clooj". :) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > (mailto:clojure@googlegroups.com) > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your > first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > (mailto:clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com) > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. 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