HProg has been an idle for quite a long time. What is its future? Should we organize some events (e.g., a contest)? Is there something going on behind the scenes that I don't know about, or has everyone really just forgotten abou it?
-- MikeNolan
I still check this site every day, hoping for an interesting bit of new content, but nobody seems to like putting up new pages. Maybe people don't want to put personal work up here for fear of the public eye, or feel it is a waste of time to replicate material here that might be found elsewhere. The last (and only) "community effort" died before it even started. I think it would be nice to see people put up snippets of code they wrote and why they wrote it, putting up interesting programming - interesting for them, no worries about what other feel is trivial. Sort of like development journals. Would require an investment of effort in order to get going, perhaps by students taking computer science courses in university - or even some professional programmers, if we have any visiting here.
Those who run the journals get the benefit of community review of their ideas, and the community gets the benefit of shared knowledge and entertainment. Plus, for somebody like me - lazy and unmotivated - having such a journal might act as a prod to keep on working at things. I'll commit to doing it if a few others will, as well.
I don't like the hprog concept too much anymore, so I'm planning on trying again this summer with a group whose stated theme is learning to program effectively, or something like that. I want to attempt to exercise minimal control over who participates, where people who can't present sufficiently sophisticated programs that they've developed will not be allowed to participate past a reasonably short trial period. I know this sounds like I'm looking for opportunities to make myself feel good by putting people down, but I think it's necessary to get the kind of community I'm looking for. Certainly around half the people in #hprog do no programming to speak of, to say nothing of providing an environment that encourages people to undertake abitious projects and improve their skills.
-- AdamChlipala
Adam, I think I would be interested in your new group, if you're moving in the direction I think you're moving in.
Hprog holds little interest to me in its current form. This is because I really don't have much interest in teaching people, and right now, this site is all about being a place to dump information that the people who care already know about. What I have an interest in is a community of peers that I can bounce ideas off of, and become informed about ideas which are genuinely new to me. I don't particularly care about attracting new people; the quality of discussion is the important part, not the frequency. Personally, I think a community blog of some sort would be ideal. Someone posts an idea, or some code, or some interesting technology they discovered, and it gets critiqued, discussed, whatever. Something like my Geekstorming blog, only with more feedback and more people contributing. A Lambda the Ultimate for *everything* programming-related.
And I don't particularly care if it's been done better by other people, or whatever, (although if there are communities out there like it already, please point me towards them) because the important bit is that the people involved are the ones doing it. Think of it as a writer's group for programmers.
*That* is a community that I would *love* to join.
-- JeremyPenner
That sounds like a very good idea. I am also very interested in education, though. Maybe this can work with that idea, where members form into groups to learn about a subject and post challenges related to it to each other in their private section of log-space.
-- AdamChlipala
Yeah, some infrastructure to easily spawn blogs for new projects (whether it's "let's play with this idea" or whatever) would be interesting and useful.
The important thing in my mind is solidifying and narrowing the intent and culture of this community right at the outset. An "old TPUers can come here to die" community won't work. (As I'm sure you're aware.) An "anyone can join and post about how they're writing Quake 4 in VB" community won't work, either. Even a community with professional developers who have written plenty of reasonably complicated software won't necessarily work, for me. The important criteria in my mind is this: Members have a solid grasp on how software development is done, and have a serious interest in learning about and developing new ideas related to it.
-- JeremyPenner