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Comment by NAR8789 | Hacker News Reader

Stupid question: how do folks generally use awesome lists?

I think it's neat they exist, but they don't really live up to the "curated" promise in my mind. Mostly they seem to be a grab bag of everything under a topic, and it's left to the reader to sort through. As such they've never come to mind when I'm actually researching anything.

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The better ones do a better job of organizing and seem (to me) to be more focused. They also offer more explanatory text around a topic/category or about an item.

This particular one covers a very broad topic, and mixes material on both functional programming languages and functional programming style in languages that permit it (at least halfway permit it). Just look at the Books section. It's not alphabetized or subcategorized by language, topic, or difficulty, just a list. There are no descriptions of the texts, and no apparent running theme. A learner should not start at the top of that list and work through it, it would be counterproductive to most readers. It would benefit from being broken down into more sections, like:

  Functional Programming
  - What it is and more universally applicable tutorials/texts

  Languages
  - Haskell
  -- Books (ordered by difficulty and topic)
  -- Tutorials (ordered by difficulty and topic)
  -- Libraries (arranged by category)
  - Elm
  -- (like above)

And accept that some entries will be included multiple times. Like a tutorial that covers both concurrency and networking in Haskell would go in both topics under that language.

Look at this part of a CL one: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#offline. The Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced breakdown is useful, and each title is given a short description. You could, in theory, follow this reading list in order and gain something on each new text as you work down the list, and they'd all be relevant to learning the topic of Common Lisp. It provides a more coherent set of information and resources (at least for that section).

Perfect! I just so happen to be learning common lisp right now. Will give that a try and see if I get more mileage out of that example.

They start out nice when they're first created, but it's really emotionally difficult to run a good one, because to be a good one, you need to say a lot of no, you're not awesome enough to be on this list. Like, far more often than you say yes. And who wants to be that person? A small percentage of people, and that set will be full of people who will make some other big social mistake and blow things up too.

So you end up with lists that really amount to "who asked to be on the list".

I like them when I am new to a technology or programming language. For example last year I spent a significant amount of time writing Go code and doing Solidity/blockchain development.

Being able to scan https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go, https://github.com/bkrem/awesome-solidity, and https://github.com/gianni-dalerta/awesome-nft for general resources, projects, guides, or just general information was a nice resource to have in my back pocket.

I think your point is valid, but it's also a personal expectation of what you get out of the resource. I think the fact that they are open ended helps both developers who are trying to reach an audience and people who are browsing for new tools, ideas, etc.

Ah, I hadn't thought about it from the publishing side. That makes sense. Easier to break into as an unknown writer than google rankings.

> Stupid question: how do folks generally use awesome lists?

I usually put a bookmark and then forget about them entirely. Gives me a little bit of dopamine for a short while though, so it isn't completely in vain.

I've found this exact same problem. It's a huge list of links, I'll open a few projects that might be interesting, save them for later — and then when I look at them, I don't remember the context (why I saved them, what for) and I'll just remove them from my list.

They have their use as a jumping-off-point, but what I _really_ want is a truly curated list. LessWrong has a list of "best textbooks" where you have to provide a "best" and one (or two?) other textbooks that you've read which you didn't like as much, and an explanation on why the former is better. I think it's a great way to curate a list. I wish there were more like that.

I just (for example) took a look at the PureScript part:

https://github.com/xgrommx/awesome-functional-programming#pu...

No link to the 'Purescript by Example' book

https://book.purescript.org/index.html

No mention of Halogen

https://purescript-halogen.github.io/purescript-halogen/inde...

Some links 404

http://blog.sigmapoint.pl/purescript-will-make-you-purr-like...

And it's like that for almost all of these awesome lists, most of which have been abandoned some time ago.

"Purescript by Example" is in the list, but up in Books. And reflects on what I noted in my comment, the information seems to be present in this list but it's not well organized.

Ah, I see, thank you. Although that is a link to the older version, not the recent, forked one. Which proves a point that I had looking at that list, it seems to be from about 5 years ago.

   This repository contains a community fork of PureScript by Example by Phil 
   Freeman, also known as "the PureScript book". This version differs from the 
   original in that it has been updated so that the code and exercises work with 
   up-to-date versions of the compiler, libraries, and tools.

https://book.purescript.org/index.html

I don't because I've usually found they fail hard at actually being curated. Generally if someone decides to make a curated source on a topic they'll actually just make an entirely new source with links to other sources as appropriate - adding the context of when specific links are helpful is valuable and seems to go against the general idea of awesome lists. I'd prefer to read a really good e-book or blog post that just includes their sources or links for further reading.

I don't think a blog post that identifies a problem someone had to solve and the resources and steps they went through to solve it (even if they don't add any real innovation about tool usage beyond their sources) is bad - but even in that format you're getting a lot more context around why some sources are awesome.

I've found that awesome lists are generally good for the dumbest, but still one of the most effective, kinds of learning: pattern-matching.

This particular list isn't particularly organized, but I can still C-f for "lens" and find a few articles. I'll open all of them, read all of them, and by the end have a good shot at understanding what a lens is and how to use one.

Certainly, reading multiple sources gives you a better chance at understanding than any one particular source.

The human brain is extremely good at pattern-matching, and so awesome lists are a great way to "train" it with "data".

I start from the assumption that it probably has everything under the sun for that specific technology and I grep for keywords, hoping that a relevant project that matches my needs jumps at me

I read them when they get posted to HN or Reddit and sometimes leads me to learning new things

Indeed they are probably most useful to the person writing them.

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