Suggestion: a category for unimplemented Haskell-related ideas

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The current categories of Topics include:

  • Learn: to raise a Haskell-related question

To tell about Haskell-related things:

  • Announcements: to tell by announcing (can also announce requests)
  • Links: to tell by linking
  • Events: to tell about events
  • Jobs: to tell about jobs
  • Show and Tell: to tell about made things

I think it might be helpful to have an express category for unimplemented Haskell-related ideas - things not yet made.

I appreciate it could be said that any idea can be turned into a question (Would it be a good idea if/to … ?) - but that seems a little ‘meta’ to me.

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Unimplemented as in “I have this idea. Am I reinventing the wheel? Is this design appropriate?” Or “I would be lovely if someone implemented my idea”?

I would welcome the first, and leave Idea Guys to other languages. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I think the current policy of having as few categories as possible is working fine.

Project ideas could be posted to the general category or even to Show and Tell if you’ve already made some progress.

These should go in Learn in my opinion.

If you want to collect multiple ready made project ideas that people could pick from to practice their skills, then perhaps that should just be a single uncategorised topic.

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To make this more concrete: I sometimes look at Topics without a Category and ask myself if they would fit natually in the existing scheme. To pick on a recent example at random, the Topic Haskell wlroots bindings.

I understand the author to have an idea - that new Haskell bindings for the wlroots library would be valuable - and be seeking to spark some discussion about that.

A Category does two things: (1) it enables Topics to be grouped, reducing ‘search costs’ for users; and (2) it signals what the Haskell Community is for. I am assuming that one thing it is for is to surface ideas/suggestions in order to seek community views on them.

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I like this proposal. Sometimes I will have an idea and find myself wanting to post here to

  • double-check that the idea isn’t implemented yet
  • notify the community that I intend to implement it
  • discuss the design and implementation tradeoffs
  • poll the community on any features they would like to see
  • gauge if there is any interest in using the finished project

I’ve refrained from making posts like this and tended to message people privately or ask around on Matrix, mostly because it seems like people use the Discourse to share finished projects instead of ideas or works-in-progress. I would like to see and participate in this kind of discussion more often though, and I think a dedicated Category would incentivize that.

Some ideas for the name: “Ideas”, “Feedback Request”

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The community-at-large probably is suffering from too many places to ‘make posts’. There’s still Haskell-cafe and even glasgow-haskell-users. If you have a definite idea for a proposal wrt the language/GHC, you can raise it as an Issue (perhaps something that seems awkward or counter-intuitive to use) or for Discussion or write up a proposal. If for libraries there’s core-libraries-committee. I suggest those are the places to look for ideas that have reached some sort of definition/in progress.

If it’s a vaguer ‘bright idea’, perhaps Discourse is the place: Haskell/GHC nowadays is a vast design-space, it’s quite possible somebody else has had a similar idea/maybe even implemented something; then the Learn category is the way to find out?

Yes people do share finished projects here; I wouldn’t say that’s “mostly” what’s going on. There’s plenty of discussion, requests for feedback on ideas-in-progress, etc.