exercism/haskell room on Gitter?

[chiroptical]

Would it make sense to have a exercism/haskell room on Gitter?

Feel free to close this if you would rather I submit issues.

[petertseng]

I tried to think of a use case but I didn't find one that it makes sense for. I am happy to be convinced if I missed a use case. I explain the use cases I brainstormed below:

• Discuss possible improvements to the track
  • Equal to status quo: It wouldn't exclude anyone. It's publicly readable and everyone with a GitHub account may post. And since it's accessible via IRC, the portion of the population who have all chat programs except IRC blocked at work will still be able to use it.
  • Disadvantage: It would be burdensome to have to look in two places (GitHub, Gitter) to look for history of past discussions. I would prefer to have it in one place, and that place is currently GitHub; we don't have a way to migrate all our existing past discussions to Gitter.
• Student support, such as "How do I solve the X exercise on the track?"
  • Disadvantage: This is only useful if the channel is populated by both: people who want to receive support, and people who want to give support. I will not personally be able to recruit either sort of person to the channel. But I don't speak for others; maybe others are willing to recruit.
  • Suggested alternative: Therefore, I suggest against creating a Gitter channel for this purpose and instead using something listed in https://github.com/exercism/haskell/blob/master/docs/RESOURCES.md (#haskell on Freenode, Stack Overflow, or Reddit's /r/haskell). I think this suggestion makes sense because Haskell techniques need not be specific to Exercism.
• Mentor support, such as "What tips should I give this student" or "How do I mentor X exercise on the track"?
  • Disadvantage: Same as above with needing to populate the channel.
  • Suggested alternative: There exists the exercism-team Slack for mentors. I am not able to acquire a link to it right now (again a mention of the portion of the population who have chat programs blocked at work) but I think it's possible to get a link to it by signing up as a mentor.
• Just chatting
  • Disadvantage: It doesn't seem necessary to restrict this to just people with GitHub/GitLab/Twitter accounts.

[chiroptical]

My motivation for the question itself was submitting improvements to problem descriptions. Which I suppose fits fine on Github. I appreciate the thoughtful comments above.

[petertseng]

Also keep in mind that if the problem comes from https://github.com/exercism/problem-specifications, then improvements to the descriptions should go there.

[sshine]

@barrymoo: Exercism currently has a Slack instance which has several channels for track maintainers and mentors. But the downside of Slack is that the chat history is proprietary, so everyone who wants access to the chat history has to pay for a Slack subscription. For that reason we much prefer to use GitHub issues for discussing possible changes to the Haskell track.

For proposing or submitting changes to the project-wide problem-specifications, please see exercism/problem-specifications#1560 first. For proposing or submitting changes to the Haskell track specifically, feel free to do so via either issues or PRs.