Ideas for projects

New to Haskell? Want to learn or practice your Haskell on a practical project? Here are some ideas for useful things you could work on.

Pre-existing projects

• The Darcs project are always looking for extra help. See especially the ProbablyEasy bugs.

Guided implementations

Sometimes you just want to write some code without having to think of the algorithms or the bigger picture. How about implementing some Functional Pearls or porting some pre-existing code to Haskell? You could then release them to the community as a nice Cabalised library.

• Polytypic unification
• Drawing Trees (pdf)
  • Note, LaTeX friendly output would be nice (see Benoit Crabbé's treeproc)
  • You could consider also graphical output, for example, with wxHaskell or gtk2hs
• Zippers

Small projects

• Implement a mediawiki robot for the task of your choice.
  • For example, it could log into wikipedia and automatically convert American English spellings into international ones (actually, this would probably be frowned upon in the live and let live culture of wikimedia).
  • Better yet, implement a mediawiki robot framework and show people how much easier it is to extend than pre-existing ones.
• Write a lambdabot plugin
  • For example?
• XRC-based guis in wxHaskell - similar to Glade? GUIs represented as XML files
• Implement a random text generator - for example, it could produce blog posts that sound a lot like the things you write, but are probably total nonsense
• A simple Sparkline generator; bonus points if you put up a happs site that people can plug things into (has been done in other languages). See also http://sparkline.org/ for a nice explanation of the idea.

Big projects

• Write a mail client in Haskell, a functional mutt would do very nicely.