As announced by Michael Snoyman a couple weeks ago, we are going to be releasing an open source version of the School of Haskell! The SoH provides interactive documentation and tutorials for newcomers and advanced haskellers alike. This interactivity comes in the form of editable code, inline in the webpage, letting you try things out as you learn them.

We are dedicated to supporting the community with excellent Haskell tools and infrastructure. As this is a community project, I'm writing this post to explain our plans, and to ask for feedback and ideas.

We are focused on eliminating any obstacles which have historically discouraged or prevented people from contributing to the School of Haskell. In particular, here are the changes we're planning:

Questions for the Community

Please help us guide this work to best serve you and the community!

Plan for the Editor Service

The editor service will allow Haskell to be edited in the browser and run on the server. This service is independent of the markdown rendering service, described below.

Editor Features

Our plan is to support the following features in the SoH code editor / runner:

This new version is going to be offering quite a lot of information! In order to have somewhere to put it all, there will be a tabbed info pane at the bottom of the snippet (much like the pane at the bottom of FPHC).

Implementation Changes

We've learned a lot about writing this sort of application since the initial creation of the School of Haskell. In particular, we're planning on making the following changes, although things aren't quite set in stone yet:

Plan for the Markdown Rendering Service

The markdown rendering service allows rendering of SoH markdown into documentation / tutorials which contain active Haskell code. We hope to make this largely backwards compatible with the old markdown format, as we'll be migrating content from the old site.

Our plan is to have a central GitHub repo which hosts the main "school" section. For example, it might be placed at https://github.com/schoolofhaskell/school. This will be a central place to put Haskell educational content, and we will heartily encourage pull requests.

You'll also be able to give the server a URL to your own publicly accessible git repo. The contents of this repo will then be served as SoH pages, possibly with a URL like https://schoolofhaskell.com/user/user-name/tutorial-name. To facilitate the migration, we'll provide a tarball of your current SoH pages, in a form readable by the new implementation.

All existing SoH URLs at https://fpcomplete.com will redirect to https://schoolofhaskell.com. In order to do this, we need to migrate the content to the new system. The current plan for this is to have a repo, possibly at https://github.com/schoolofhaskell/soh-migration-snapshot, which will be used as a fallback for users who haven't yet specified a repo for their account.

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