New meeting the Friday 8/19

[William Le Ferrand]

Dear all,

During the last two weeks, baoug.org had more that 600 visits, and we
got more that 250 solutions to the 4 challenges (what a conversion
rate!). It's time to turn this experiment into a real and fun website
for OCaml enthusiasts, where challenges are linked to tutorials and
lessons.

Among the suggested features for the next version :

* Typing, benchmarking of code on client side (live toplevel, so that
people can experiment ocaml without installing anything)
* Tutorials to explain what notions are required to solve a problem
(terminal recursion?)
* Sample solutions with a lot of details about a precise
implementation (using immutable structures leads to a more performant
code, why?)
* Chaining problems, to aggregate them in "lessons"
* Support for other languages (haskell?)
* Syntax highlightning

Let's join the 19th of August (anytime in the afternoon, and the event
can spread over the entire weekend) in San Francisco and get some of
those features done ? Everyone is invited, including remote
contributors! We'll organize a dinner and for those who might use
their children as an excuse we can organize a visit of the museum in
the golden gate park or some good time on the beach friday afternoon
or on the satuday :))

Who's in ?

Cheers

William

[Ian Zimmerman]

I can join on Friday only. Mostly for the beach ;-)

--
Ian Zimmerman
gpg public key: 1024D/C6FF61AD
fingerprint: 66DC D68F 5C1B 4D71 2EE5 BD03 8A00 786C C6FF 61AD
Rule 420: All persons more than eight miles high to leave the court.

[Ian Zimmerman]

Oops, now I realized I have another engagement Friday night. And that
means I have to go shopping in the afternoon.

I never thought ocaml was this powerful :-)

[Thomas]

Hi,

I am very fond of what you did with baoug, and I am eager to see what
you produced during the week-end.

Regarding the suggestions you made, I think that the following two
are very important (even if the second one is probably painful to
add):

> Among the suggested features for the next version :

>  * Chaining problems, to aggregate them in "lessons"

>  * Syntax highlightning

I have a teaching assistant position next year, and would have gladly
used (a clone of) baoug to submit exercises to student. This require
another feature however, the ability to log the solutions of given
users (and be able to have a global overview of who answered to what,
in which time frame, and so on)... While this is a mere suggestion (I
know nothing of Ocsigen, and cannot lear it at the moment), I think
such features would attract a lot of users.

Keep up the good work,
Thomas

[Ashish Agarwal]

Hi Thomas,

We have begun a project to build a new website for the OCaml community. My hope is that it will be a dynamic website with social networking features. Thus, there is the possibility of joining the baoug.org project and this other project, automatically providing access to a large number of user accounts. William and I are in touch about it, but both projects are just beginning. It will be some months before something like this might happen, but please keep it in mind as a possible goal.

-Ashish