Project: Chrome extension that queries a custom dictionary for Haskell terms

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Tags

Simple, Web, Chrome Extension

Why

Learning Haskell can be very hard for both experienced programmers and novices because of a lot of new lingo. What’s a functor? A monad? What do they mean by “mapping over” a data structure?

Wouldn’t it be nice if, on Haskell-related websites, such terms were automatically tagged with a tooltip that appears when you hover over it (or click it)? The tooltip itself could just refer to some newbie-friendly tutorial or wiki page.

What you will learn

This one is pretty devoid of Haskell programming. You’ll learn to create a Chrome extension and will have to write some JavaScript (although you could use TypeScript or PureScript instead.)

Rough implementation guide

Chrome extension

There’s already an existing Chrome extension that does something similar: Dictionary Lookup for Chrome. Apart from the Chrome extension, that Github repo has an entire Wiki-scraping parser that is irrelevant.

It might also be worthwhile (and interesting!) to simply write your own Chrome extension.

Bonus features

Data source

For development purposes, a simple hardcoded JSON array would suffice. For the live dictionary, there are a lot of options, but my simplest idea would be to have a Github repository that hosts a JSON file. This would allow people to submit push requests to update the JSON file with new or updated entries.

Bonus features