[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 78 - July 23, 2008

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Wed Jul 23 16:13:45 EDT 2008


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080723
Issue 78 - July 23, 2008
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   Welcome to issue 78 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   Issue 78: In Which Michi and Neil Become Doctors, Sun Donates Some
   Sweet Loot, and Jules Is Revealed To Be A Helpful Anthropomorphic Robot

Community News

   Congratulations are in order this week to two members of the community
   who have completed PhDs. Neil Mitchell (ndm) passed his PhD viva last
   week, subject to minor corrections. Mikael Johansson (Syzygy-) [2]has
   also completed his PhD and will soon be starting a postdoc at Stanford
   with the topology in computer science working group. Congratulations,
   Drs. Mitchell and Johansson!

Announcements

   rosezipper. Eric Kow (kowey) [3]announced the release of [4]rosezipper,
   Krasimir Angelov and Iavor S. Diatchki's Data.Tree implementation of
   zippers.

   list-extras 0.1.0. wren ng thornton (koninkje) [5]announced the initial
   release of [6]list-extras, a home for common not-so-common list
   functions.

   Sun Microsystems and Haskell.org joint project on OpenSPARC. Duncan
   Coutts (dcoutts) [7]announced a [8]joint project between Sun
   Microsystems and the Haskell.org community to exploit the high
   performance capabilities of Sun's latest multi-core [9]OpenSPARC
   systems via Haskell! Sun has donated a powerful 8 core SPARC Enterprise
   T5120 Server to the Haskell community, and $10,000 to fund a student
   to further develop support for high performance Haskell on the SPARC.
   The student will work with a mentor from Haskell.org and an adviser
   from Sun's SPARC compiler team. If you're a student and this sounds
   interesting to you, send in those applications!!

   Hayoo! beta 0.2. Timo B. [10]announced the second beta release of
   [11]Hayoo!, a Haskell API search engine providing advanced features
   like suggestions, find-as-you-type, fuzzy queries and much more. The
   major change in this release is the inclusion of all packages available
   on Hackage in the index.

   Haskell-beginners mailing list. Benjamin L. Russell [12]announced the
   creation of the [13]Haskell-Beginners Mailing List, beginners at
   haskell.org, devoted to discussion of primarily beginner-level topics
   related to Haskell. It's already off to a great start, so if you're a
   Haskell beginner, or someone interested in answering beginner
   questions, please subscribe!

   Haskeline 0.2. Judah Jacobson [14]announced the initial (alpha-ish)
   release of [15]Haskeline, a library for line input in command-line
   programs. It is similar in purpose to editline or readline, but is
   written in Haskell and thus (hopefully) more easily used in other
   Haskell programs.

Google Summer of Code

   Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [16]Google Summer of
   Code.

   Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps
   using generalized tries. [17]This week, he ran QuickCheck on his test
   suite for the first time, and found a large number of failing tests!
   He's got his work cut out for him straightening those out over the next
   few days.

   DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a
   [18]physics engine using [19]Data Parallel Haskell. [20]This week, he
   implemented full handling of rigid body collisions, including angular
   velocity. Next he plans to explore various ways to make the engine
   faster, including broad-phase collision detection.

   GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins
   for GHC. [21]This week, he revealed his "mystery project": an HTML
   pretty-printer for GHC core! [22]Here is a sample. Now his focus turns
   to tidying things up and solidifying documentation in preparation for
   getting his patches merged into GHC HEAD.

   Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on [23]Hoogle 4. [24]This
   week, he fleshed out the final part of type search, including support
   for instances and alpha renaming of variables. Unfortunately, it uses
   too much memory to be feasibly run on the base libraries! Neil has some
   ideas on how to fix this, however, which he plans to tackle next week.

   Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is [25]working on Language.C, a
   standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. He has finally
   completed a working implementation for analysing declarations and
   definitions, and [26]presents a working example of the library's use.

   Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a
   [27]make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal.

   GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on [28]improvements to
   the GHC API.

Libraries

   Proposals and extensions to the [29]standard libraries.

   generalize mapAccumL/R. Ross Paterson [30]proposed adding generalized
   versions of mapAccumL and mapAccumR to Data.Traversable.

   signal-handling API. Simon Marlow [31]proposed a [32]new
   signal-handling API.

Discussion

   Point-free style in guards. L29Ah [33]asked a question about using a
   points-free style in guard expressions, leading to a number of clever
   suggestions involving custom combinators.

   Optimizing sequence. Gracjan Polak started a [34]discussion on the
   strictness properties of the sequence function, and its implications
   for optimization. It sounds as though adding an alternate strict
   version of sequence to the libraries could be a good idea.

Blog noise

   [35]Haskell news from the [36]blogosphere.

     * Eric Kow (kowey): [37]rose zipper on hackage. Eric has uploaded an
       implementation of a zipper for Data.Tree to hackage.
     * Jamie Brandon: [38]QuickCheck strikes again. An update on Jamie's
       Google Summer of Code project. Lots of failing QuickCheck tests
       mean Jamie has his work cut out for him.
     * >>> Ayumilove: [39]Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 1. A video
       introduction to Haskell?
     * Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach): [40]Status report: week 7-8. An update
       on Roman's Google Summer of Code project.
     * Conal Elliott (conal): [41]Designing for the future.
     * Benedikt Huber (visq): [42]Language.C: Analysing Definitions. An
       update on Benedikt's Google Summer of Code project.
     * Max Bolingbroke: [43]Compiler Plugins For GHC: Week Six. An update
       on Max's Google Summer of Code project.
     * Arnar Birgisson (Arnar): [44]Playing with Haskell's lazy lists.
       Arnar implements Eric Rowland's [45]simple prime-generating
       recurrence using lazy lists in Haskell.
     * Neil Mitchell (ndm): [46]GSoC Hoogle: Week 8. An update on Neil's
       Google Summer of Code project.
     * Matthew Sackman: [47]What is the point?. Matthew had his submission
       rejected from the Haskell Symposium, and isn't happy about it.
     * Tupil: [48]Stemming with Haskell reloaded. An updated, more
       functional/Haskellish interface to the stemmer library.
     * Luke Palmer (luqui): [49]Semantic Design. Luke's reflections on a
       design approach learned from Conal Elliott.
     * Muad`Dib (vixey): [50]Rascal - Mini-haskell like language.
     * Jeremy Shaw: [51]HTML Templating in HAppS using HSP. Jeremy writes
       a very cool introduction/tutorial to using HSP (Haskell Server
       Pages) with HAppS.
     * >>> Duane Johnson: [52]Lazy Evaluation at Work. Duane likes the
       idea of lazy file I/O.
     * >>> Duane Johnson: [53]A Glimmer of Monadic Hope. Duane figures out
       do-notation.
     * >>> Duane Johnson: [54]Using 'foldr' in Haskell. Duane figures out
       how to define (++) and concat in terms of foldr.
     * Mikael Johansson (Syzygy-): [55]Dr rer nat, Magna cum laude.
     * >>> Holden Karau: [56]Integrating your HUnit (or other) tests into
       your cabal package.
     * Real-World Haskell: [57]Beta availability hiccups.
     * >>> Antoine Hersen: [58]ICFP 2008 Postmortem.
     * Edward Kmett (edwardk): [59]A Sort of Difference. Edward uses an
       analysis of quicksort in Haskell as a jumping-off point for an
       introduction to difference lists.
     * Ralf Lammel: [60]The Expression Lemma -- Explained. Ralf explains
       the relationship between OOP and FP.
     * >>> Greg McClure: [61]Learning languages through problem-solving.
       Greg extols the virtues of [62]Project Euler for learning new
       languages, and exhibits a solution to the first problem in Haskell,
       Erlang, and Python.

Quotes of the Week

     * kryptiskt: my point is that our brain isn't some logic machine,
       it's a jury-rigged contraption to help us get food, friends and
       sex. It's the Perl of intelligences.
     * Fallacy: peyton `simon` jones
     * Quadrescence: [on #haskell] Well, the nice population here attracts
       people. Unlike other pla_C_es. How'd those underscores get there?
     * mauke: hmm, regexes get even more cryptic after z-encoding:
       ZLz3fUZCZLz3fUzlznzrwZRZLz3fUzezrwZRzbZLz3fUzlzezrwZRZLz3fUznzrwZRZR
     * BMeph: Haskell: Where even the newest newcomer acts monadically:
       join :: ask (ask something) -> ask something
     * Quadrescence: quicksilver: You must be an anthropomorphic robot or
       something.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [63]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [64]the Haskell Sequence and [65]Planet Haskell. [66]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [67]haskell.org. Headlines are
   available as [68]PDF.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [69]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [70]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://blog.mikael.johanssons.org/archive/2008/07/dr-rer-nat-magna-cum-laude/
   3. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/07/rose-zipper-on-hackage.html
   4. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/rosezipper
   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42485
   6. http://code.haskell.org/~wren/
   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16351
   8. http://haskell.org/opensparc/
   9. http://opensparc.net/
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16349
  11. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/hayoo
  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16345
  13. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16343
  15. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskeline
  16. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008
  17. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/quickcheck-strikes-again.html
  18. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hpysics
  19. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell
  20. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2008/07/status-report-week-7-8.html
  21. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/07/21/compiler-plugins-for-ghc-week-six/
  22. http://www.omega-prime.co.uk/files/GHC-Core-HTML.html
  23. http://code.haskell.org/hoogle/
  24. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-8.html
  25. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c/wiki/
  26. http://hsbene.blogspot.com/2008/07/languagec-analysing-definitions.html
  27. http://code.haskell.org/~Saizan/cabal
  28. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApiStatus
  29. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library_submissions
  30. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9649
  31. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9599
  32. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2451
  33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42475
  34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42453
  35. http://planet.haskell.org/
  36. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  37. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/07/rose-zipper-on-hackage.html
  38. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/quickcheck-strikes-again.html
  39. http://www.5min.com/Video/Ayumilove-Haskell-Programming-Tutorial-Part-1-31180892
  40. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2008/07/status-report-week-7-8.html
  41. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/conal/~3/342784118/
  42. http://hsbene.blogspot.com/2008/07/languagec-analysing-definitions.html
  43. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/07/21/compiler-plugins-for-ghc-week-six/
  44. http://www.hvergi.net/2008/07/playing-with-haskells-lazy-lists/
  45. http://recursed.blogspot.com/2008/07/rutgers-graduate-student-finds-new.html
  46. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-8.html
  47. http://www.wellquite.org/what_is_the_point.html
  48. http://blog.tupil.com/stemming-with-haskell-reloaded/
  49. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/07/18/semantic-design/
  50. http://muaddibspace.blogspot.com/2008/07/rascal-mini-haskell-like-language.html
  51. http://nhlab.blogspot.com/2008/07/html-templating-in-happs-using-hsp.html
  52. http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/18/lazy-evaluation-at-work/
  53. http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/17/a-glimmer-of-monadic-hope/
  54. http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/17/using-foldr-in-haskell/
  55. http://blog.mikael.johanssons.org/archive/2008/07/dr-rer-nat-magna-cum-laude/
  56. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/holdenkarau/iYtm/~3/337908379/integrating-your-hunit-or-other-tests.html
  57. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/07/16/beta-availability-hiccups/
  58. http://endymion2021.livejournal.com/17117.html
  59. http://comonad.com/reader/2008/a-sort-of-difference/
  60. http://blogs.msdn.com/ralflammel/archive/2008/07/16/the-expression-lemma-explained.aspx
  61. http://www.codechops.com/?p=15
  62. http://www.projecteuler.net/
  63. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  64. http://sequence.complete.org/
  65. http://planet.haskell.org/
  66. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  67. http://haskell.org/
  68. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/archives/20080723.pdf
  69. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  70. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/


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