Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Circling through ideas

I can't make my mind up about what to do in my free time (I have some, yes yes). I keep circling between the same ideas, thinking "that would be good", then jumping to the next one.

  • Keep on working on EclipseFP and other Haskell IDE related ideas. I would like for example to unify the storage of metadata between buildwrapper, scion-browser and eclipsefp, to have one database to would keep library information (definitions, documentations) like scion-browser, AST with types like buildwrapper, usage references like the usage DB in EclipseFP. It could be interesting to try to use that database to drive an IDE and have a clear repository of metadata. But then I'm tired of working on my own on EclipseFP, and when I see that Leksah really has also one active maintainer, I think people are really not interested in advancing Haskell IDEs, they must be happy with Emacs/vi and ghc-mod at a push, so why bother?
  • Then I think working on games is fun! I had fun writing Mazes of Monad, and other little games, and I do enjoy playing role playing or adventure games (I can really recommend the last one I've completed, the Longest Journey), so maybe writing a game the reactive way or even for Android like the guys at Keera Studios do would be a good use of my time. Then I remember I'm a programmer that sucks at graphics design and would probably suck as much at game design.
  • Games are too trivial, let's do something that will change the world, like work on AI! A few books I've read like Kurzweil's and Hawkins' have been truly inspirational, so maybe I could write some HMM neural temporal gizmo that would become sentient over night!! Then I wake up. People smarter than me and with more time than me are already working on that, so I would not contribute anything anyway. Why don't I help these people by providing a better programming experience, for example a Haskell IDE? Back to idea 1!
Ah well, I'll go back to browsing Reddit!

7 comments:

AlanKim Zimmerman said...

I am hoping that with GHC 7.10 the Haskell IDE space will have some more scope, based on the changes in it

https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApi

Rick Fleischer said...

Indecision has turned me into a Singularity tourist also.

Thomas ten Cate said...

Writing games is fun indeed! Why not join Ludum Dare this weekend? http://ludumdare.com

none said...

Don't confuse a lack of participation with a lack of popularity!

Federico Tomassetti said...

I understand completely. For sure this uncertainty is stressing but I am not sure is that negative, it helps learning a lot and never get bored

jutaro said...

Why not a Haskell IDE with Browser GUI(Purescript,Elm,Ghcjs,..) with support for different languages (Ghc, Idris, Agda, Coq, Purescript, Elm, ...). I will help. Jürgen

Unknown said...

+1 for EclipseFP. You've put a lot of work into that and it's good.