[erlang-questions] Google Summer of Code 2014 with the BEAM Community

[José Valim]

>
> Any chance this year it could be a little more transparent for people who
> can't invest all their time in following it?
>

Our first goal is to ensure a good environment and experience for the
students. The second goal is to ensure the projects and their contributors
can learn something with the student work and possibly merge it back. We
have weekly reports in the mailing list to keep track of those goals, so
they are mostly meant for the community active in the participating
projects.

Given everyone participating already reserves a good amount of their free
time to organize and mentor students, help to make the students work more
transparent for the community as a whole is definitely welcome. Maybe you
could help by compiling some sort of bi-weekly e-mail? Other ideas are also
welcome!

As it stands now I have no idea if any project benefited from it. Perhaps
> this is something that could be useful for my projects, but it doesn't
> really sound like it right now.


All projects last year were pleased with the results. You can ping them for
a more detailed list of pros and cons. There is also plenty of reports from
other organizations out there.

I can speak in particular about Elixir results. We have merged part of the
student work:

1. The student worked on pretty printing for Elixir along the community. In
particular, the community had already started work on pretty printing,
however it was based Wadler's work for Haskell (a lazy language) and the
performance was not optimal for Elixir. The student ported the work to an
OCaml based implementation as described in the "Strictly Pretty" paper by
Christian Lindig;

2. The remaining of the student work went into an interactive/debugging
tool and some of it was merged back as well. He's continued working on the
project as part of his thesis;

Keep in mind though the focus of the Summer of Code is the student. A good
project is first useful for the student and second for the maintainers.
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