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From: RedGrittyBrick on 23 Jun 2010 05:20
On 22/06/2010 14:53, David Segall wrote:
> Patricia Shanahan<pats(a)acm.org> wrote:
>
>> I'm looking for an open source project to join. I want to get back to
>> the challenge of non-trivial programming. After years of solo work on my
>> dissertation research, I would like to be part of a team. Also, just
>> doing programming exercises to keep my hand in seems a waste of my skills.
>>
>> My main requirement is an active project, with a team that works
>> together, and multiple users outside the team. I am willing learn any
>> required programming languages or libraries, though I am currently most
>> fluent in Java.
>>
>> I have 32 years experience in the computer industry, including work on
>> compilers, operating systems, and multiprocessor computer architecture.
>> I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at UCSD last December, with a
>> 4.0 GPA on the coursework.
>>
>> I would contribute to a suitable project in whatever way would be most
>> useful, including programming and bug fixing, but the more technical
>> challenge the better.
>>
>> Any recommendations?
>
> _Please_ add a high quality filter to an existing cross platform news
> reader so that I can ditch MS Windows. I know nothing about the
> project but Thunderbird seems a likely candidate. The filter should
> support killing a sub-thread and regular expressions.

If I remember correctly, Joshua Cranmer did some work in this area that
was included in the 3.0 release. I'd also like to see it taken further.

Features seen in other newsreaders:
- scoring criteria based on arbitrary headers.
- filtering criteria based on scores.
- filtering outcomes - read-status, visibility, deletion.
- optional expiry dates for scoring rules.
- easy-to-learn, easy-to-use user interface for above.

I use TB for both email and newsreading but there may be advantages in
separating out these functions into separate applications (perhaps with
shared libraries).

I recall JWZ identified effective heuristics for threading messages,
maybe this is an area that could be reviewed in Thunderbird, In some
newsgroups threading seems to suffer. For example in
comp.databases.informix - I suspect some of this is due to an
interaction with bidirectional gateways between mailing list servers and
NNTP servers that affect the headers used for threading.

I imagine Thunderbird has an extensive bug-list & wish list and is
fertile ground for anyone seeking a challenge and to make an impact on a
popular project.

--
RGB
From: tm on 23 Jun 2010 06:04
On 22 Jun., 14:57, Patricia Shanahan <p...(a)acm.org> wrote:
> tm wrote:
>
> ...> If you want to make a better world and don't fear the language
> > competition Seed7 is the right project for you. :-)
>
> > Please give me some feedback.
>
> ...
>
> Although I have no objection to improving the world as a side effect,
> user base and development team are higher priority. Can you tell me a
> bit about the users who are depending on Seed7 and the rest of your team?

Statements about Seed7 users are not easy since it is not required
to give me feedback and most users don't tell me what they do.

But I try to do some estimates:
At Sourceforge Seed7 is downloaded 400-500 times every month and the
ranking floats approximately between 1000 and 2000 (today it is at
1142). AFAIK there are approx. 250000 projects at Sourceforge, so
this ranking is not bad. There are sites such as Heise (publisher
of the German computer magazine c't) who maintain their own download
repository (see http://www.heise.de/software/download/seed7/62678)
so the actual number of people downloading Seed7 is probably higher.
There is a FreeBSD port (see http://www.freshports.org/lang/seed7)
where I have no information about the number of users. I have also
information about magazines releasing Seed7 on their CDs or DVDs
(In the moment I have no link at hand). The number of downloads and
the number of mirrors and reuses is definitively going up.
BTW: I do not download Seed7 to push the numbers. :-)

There are Seed7 users who present their workings in the internet.
E.g.: Mensanator (I know his real name but he prefers to use this
alias in the internet) who presents some of his research on the 3n+C
extension of the Collatz Conjecture (as comic book) in the internet
(see http://mensanator.com/mensanator/cycle/ultimate_cycle.htm). He
used Python and the GMP library for this research and switched to
Seed7 and its built in unlimited precision integer support to get
more performance (The compiler compiles Seed7 programs to C which
subsequently is compiled to machine code). For this example Seed7
succeeded where other languages failed. AFAIK Mensanator also
continues to use Python (probably for other stuff). I recently
ported Seed7 to 64 Bit Mac OS X to support Mensanator. He had
switched from PC to Mac and now his Seed7 programs can be moved
between this platforms without any change. He talked also about
another project where he wanted to use Seed7, but I have not asked
for the details.

Several people have contacted me because they try to use Seed7 for
embedded stuff (which was not my prime goal). Other users have sent
me example programs (such as Volker Schuller with his analog clock)
or libraries (such as Leonardo Cecchi with his Gtk-server connection
library). The analog clock and the Gtk-server connection are in the
Seed7 release for some time now. BTW: Most users prefer to contact
me directly therefore you will find only few and outdated mails
in forums and mailing lists (I would prefer that this would be
reverse but obviously most users want to talk to me directly).

A relative new contact is someone who wants to use Seed7 to write
a board game. I gave some unreleased code (portable bitmap font
support and other stuff) to this person in the hope to get improved
versions back.

Although I get patches, suggestions, examples and other stuff
from various people I cannot say that there is a team of regular
developers. IMHO users usually request more features than they
contribute, but this is not a problem. Generally I think that the
number of users always outnumbers the number of contributors by far.

> I spent the last few years doing programming to answer research
> questions, so now I want to make sure that what I do is really useful.

One of the main goals of Seed7 is that it is really useful for
practical problems. This results in much unseen work in the
libraries. E.g.: Supporting big UTF-32 strings and huge files
(with 64 bit offsets) on several operating systems with several
compilers (when there are different native UNICODE representations
and different (sometimes buggy) functions to get and set the file
position). Reading of UNICODE file names from directories or getting
the current time under Windows and UNIX (using various compilers)
needs also several driver libraries. Portability cannot be reached
when a Seed7 user has to rely on operating system functions or
external libraries.

> For comparison, I know Apache is producing useful stuff, because I've
> used some of it. There is obviously a substantial group of people
> working on it.

Of course Seed7 cannot compete with the user base and development
team of Apache. If it is just size that matters you should probably
not choose Seed7. OTOH Seed7 is definitively used (and useful) and
its user base is growing so you could be an important part of
something which grows instead of being a small part in something
which is already big.

Please take a look at the Seed7 homepage to get more information.

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
From: Martijn Mulder on 23 Jun 2010 07:20
> I'm looking for an open source project to join. I want to get back to
> the challenge of non-trivial programming.


Can you please join the JOGL-group, that seems to be abandonned by Sun. It
gives an OO API to Java programmers who need OpenGL.

http://www.javagaming.org/index.php/topic,21516.0.html


From: kwikius on 26 Jun 2010 04:15
On Jun 22, 9:19 am, p...(a)informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
wrote:

> Modify python to remove the signifiance of spaces.  One good solution
> would be to use parentheses.

Or Modify C++ to use significant indentation rather than braces..

I was going to suggest.. writing a non-ambiguous definition of an
rvalue reference but that work has been going on intensively ( and
quite comically ) for 5 years with no significant progress to
date.. :-)

regards
Andy Little


From: James Harris on 27 Jun 2010 14:09
On 21 June, 16:44, Patricia Shanahan <p...(a)acm.org> wrote:
> I'm looking for an open source project to join. I want to get back to
> the challenge of non-trivial programming. After years of solo work on my
> dissertation research, I would like to be part of a team. Also, just
> doing programming exercises to keep my hand in seems a waste of my skills.
>
> My main requirement is an active project, with a team that works
> together, and multiple users outside the team. I am willing learn any
> required programming languages or libraries, though I am currently most
> fluent in Java.
>
> I have 32 years experience in the computer industry, including work on
> compilers, operating systems, and multiprocessor computer architecture.
> I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at UCSD last December, with a
> 4.0 GPA on the coursework.
>
> I would contribute to a suitable project in whatever way would be most
> useful, including programming and bug fixing, but the more technical
> challenge the better.
>
> Any recommendations?

I guess you can take your pick. There are likely more projects looking
for contributors than developers looking for tasks to take on! How
will you choose? If it depends on the subject you could try something
from the following page. Not to be overlooked it also has links to
other directories of projects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open_source_software_packages

If you want to choose a team that works well together asking on
comp.programming was probably a good idea, but you've done that. Other
options may be Sourceforge or its ilk such as

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities

Some specific suggestions:

openstreetmap - great goals but really needs to be more user
friendly
mythtv - TV recording, quite mature but work needed
wikispaces - friendly company, editing options need improving (IMHO)
linux, freebsd
xfree86 - clunky and unfriendly
newsgroup alt.os.development
newsgroup comp.lang.misc
newsgroup comp.compilers
various forms of middleware - for example, defining an os-
independent driver interface layer and plugging existing drivers into
it, but there are plenty of other needs

The three newsgroups sometimes have innovative people wanting to share
their vision and would welcome input (but it must be said they are
often individuals rather than teams).

A word of caution from the book Dreaming in Code. You could put a lot
of work into something that ultimately fails to become a product. My
impression from the book was that there was a lot of enthusiasm but
that project lacked a clear goal.

In fact, given your experience you could probably write a book if you
were so inclined.

Just out of interest maybe you could let us know what you eventually
decide to do and whether it turns out to be what you expected.

James
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