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Let me throw out another idea that fits all the goals, but has a (potentially) more manageable scope and a more compelling community usage:a d3 backend for Diagrams + some basic example plotting utilities on top would in some ways be a bit narrower. Likewise, there are many many folks in the haskell community who would love a declarative way to embed d3 style visuals into their websites / html based documents.
This would be less prescriptive than "designing a good plotting / data vis tool" (thats really hard, anyone who says otherwise is lying lying lying), and there'd be a lot of really tractable incremental steps.
Eg a first step could be just writing a haskell plotting layer than maps directly to the trifacta vega tool (which is simpler to target than d3 directly)
and then after that, some work could be done building a diagrams backend for d3 itself. Not full d3, I think that might be tricky until we have ghcjs or the like working nicely sometime this fall or later, but just having a working d3 backend (which is sort of an abstraction layer over html5 canvas) would be pretty exciting for a lot of folks, myself included.
also D4 would be a cute name for a Diagrams D3 backend.
for things like Data Vis / Plotting / most data analysis tools, theres a really tight coupling between the API you provide, and how easily you can support doing interesting work... so in some ways, work that enriches diagrams as a substrate is more likely to be work that can be built on by subsequent folks, or outright used.Any work at the data vis / plotting layer requires really really heavily using it and getting lots of feedback who'll be using it *intensly* and *regularly*. I think that sort of extra footwork is a bit much for a GSOC sized project... but thats just me and my data vis hacking. (which should move along more soonish, but not in time to be helpful for GSOC proposals).
Whilst I'd like to see Haskell charting capabilities more broadly available, I'm worried about creating a fork of the existing charting library. Will it have an ongoing maintainer? Will existing users migrate if it's not 100% feature compatible with the existing one? Etc.
An alternative approach that might be considered would be to modify the existing library to abstract the drawing API, and then create backend instances of this abstraction for the existing Cairo/gtk capabilities and for diagrams also.
This would keep a single library visible to the community, whilst giving all the benefits of the proposed GSOC project.
Tim