[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 79 - July 31, 2008
Brent Yorgey
byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Thu Jul 31 16:47:57 EDT 2008
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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080731
Issue 79 - July 31, 2008
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Welcome to issue 79 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
[1]Haskell community.
Apologies for the slightly late issue this week, attributable to a
combination of having to transfer all my files onto a different
computer (my former employer had the audacity to request the return of
their laptop, now that I no longer work for them) and packing up to
move to Philadelphia on Saturday. At any rate, some exciting news this
week, including #haskell passing the 500 mark and a new release of Yi
-- enjoy!
Community News
Correction from last week's issue: congratulations were bestowed upon a
certain "Dr. Johansson" who does not, in fact, exist, having been
replaced almost a year ago by the happily married but otherwise
identical Dr. Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson.
Announcements
A fancier Get monad or two (a la binary and binary-strict). Chris
Kuklewicz [2]announced two new Get-like monads for binary data, with a
number of additional features.
#haskell irc channel reaches 500 users. Don Stewart [3]announced that
6 1/2 years after its inception, under the guiding hand of Shae Erisson
(aka shapr), the [4]#haskell IRC channel on freenode has finally
reached 500 users! This puts the channel at around the 12th largest
(and mostest friendliest) community of the 7000 freenode channels.
RandomDotOrg-0.1. Austin Seipp [5]announced the release of the
[6]RandomDotOrg package, an interface to the [7]random.org random
number generator.
Mueval 0.3.1, 0.4, 0.4.5, 0.4.6, 0.5. Gwern Branwen [8]announced a
number of releases of [9]Mueval, a package allowing dynamic runtime
evaluation of Haskell expressions. As far as anyone knows, all possible
security holes have been plugged, and it's missing only a few features
before it can replace hs-plugins as lambdabot's evaluation mechanism.
Need functional programmers for debugging study. Chris Bogart [10]asked
for functional programmers currently developing or maintaining a medium
to large-sized program, willing to let him look over their shoulder
while they do debugging or coding on the project.
Yi 0.4.1. Jean-Philippe Bernardy [11]announced the 0.4.1 release of the
Yi editor, a text editor written and extensible in Haskell. The
long-term goal of the Yi project is to provide the editor of choice for
Haskell programmers.
Hipmunk 0.1 and HipmunkPlayground 0.1. Felipe Lessa [12]announced the
availability of [13]Hipmunk, containing bindings for the [14]Chipmunk
2D physics engine, and [15]Hipmunk Playground, where you may see some
of Hipmunk's features in action. The bindings are low-level but try to
hide most of the nasty details of the C code.
faster BLAS bindings. Patrick Perry [16]announced that he has
[17]largely closed the C performance gap with his recent [18]Haskell
BLAS bindings. Expect a new release shortly.
FPers in Northwest Arkansas?. Nathan Bloomfield [19]is wondering if
there are any Haskellers in the NW Arkansas region to start a
functional programming interest group in the area.
Italian Haskellers Summer Meeting. Pasqualino 'Titto' Assini
[20]announced something about a summer meeting for Italian Haskellers.
If you would like to know precisely what it was that was announced, I
suggest you learn Italian.
InterleavableIO. Marco Tulio Gontijo e Silva [21]announced a package,
[22]interleavableIO, based on Jules Bean (quicksilver)'s [23]monadic
tunneling code.
Google Summer of Code
Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [24]Google Summer of
Code.
Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on [25]Hoogle 4. [26]This
week, he rewrote type search: after three days of coding, it required
only a few minor debugging tweaks to get it to work. Haskell FTW!
Expect a public beta of the command line interface next week.
Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps
using generalized tries. [27]This week, he has finally got everything
up and running bug free on the new API, except the internals are still
using association lists instead of AVL trees. He also exhibits a
promising benchmark.
DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a
[28]physics engine using [29]Data Parallel Haskell.
GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins
for GHC.
Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a
[30]make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal.
Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is [31]working on Language.C, a
standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99.
GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on [32]improvements to
the GHC API.
Discussion
Build system woes. Roman Leshchinskiy began a [33]discussion on Cabal
and GHC's new build system, with some suggestions for improving the
process.
Syb Renovations? Issues with Data.Generics. Claus Reinke [34]brought up
a number of issues with Data.Generics, with suggestions for
improvement.
A question about mfix. Wei Hu [35]asked a question about the definition
and semantics of mfix, the monadic fix operation.
Using fundeps to resolve polymorphic types to concrete types. Bryan
Donlan [36]asked a question about the interaction between functional
dependencies and type checking, with a rather subtle answer.
Best book/tutorial on category theory and its applications. fero
[37]asked for recommendations on a book about category theory.
Loss of humour. Andrew Coppin [38]laments the loss of some of Haskell's
humorous heritage.
Blog noise
[39]Haskell news from the [40]blogosphere.
* Ketil Malde: [41]Updates and other trivialities.
* Ulisses Costa: [42]Lex/yacc. A short lex/yacc tutorial.
* Luke Plant: [43]Haskell Regex replace. Luke wonders if anyone knows
how to do regex replace in Haskell.
* Eric Kow (kowey): [44]simple random numbers in Haskell. Eric writes
a simple tutorial for the System.Random module.
* Jamie Brandon: [45]Week 7 progress (respect my formatting damnit).
An update on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project.
* Tupil: [46]Formlets in Haskell.
* John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [47]Seen in the Haskell wiki.
* Ulisses Costa: [48]Type inference.
* Dennis Bueno: [49]ICFP Contest 2008 -- The One Liners. Dennis
describes his experiences participating in this year's ICFP
Programming Contest.
* Magnus Therning: [50]More prefixes.
* Don Stewart (dons): [51]Haskell: Batteries Included.
* >>> Harry Pierson: [52]Monadic Philosophy Part 2 - The LINQ Monad.
* >>> Harry Pierson: [53]Monadic Philosophy. Harry begins a series
explaining his journey through understanding monads.
* Ulisses Costa: [54]Pointfree Calculator.
* Eric Kow (kowey): [55]pandoc gets mediawiki support.
* Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [56]The Fibonacci Numbers, Coalgebraicaly.
* Twan van Laarhoven: [57]Solving nonograms.
* >>> Ayumilove: [58]Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 2A.
* >>> Ayumilove: [59]Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 2B.
* >>> Ayumilove: [60]Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 3.
* >>> Darren Moffat: [61]T5120 donated to Haskell Community. Sun's
donation inspires Darren to get back into Haskell and maybe
contribute some code to GHC again, like he did back when he was a
student at Glasgow.
* Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson (DrSyzygy): [62]Blackbox computing of
A-infinity algebras. The last results from Mikael's thesis have
made it into article form, and are [63]available on the arXiv.
* John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [64]OSCon Update.
* Real-World Haskell: [65]Beta availability hiccups.
* John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [66]First 2 Days of OSCon. John reports
live from OSCon.
* Neil Mitchell: [67]GSoC Hoogle: Week 9. An update on Neil's Google
Summer of Code project.
* Patrick Perry: [68]Addressing Haskell BLAS Performance Issues.
Patrick's Haskell BLAS bindings are now significantly sped up, and
he explains what made the difference.
* Arnar Birgisson (Arnar): [69]Parsing annotated postfix operators
with Haskell. Arnar exhibits a neat pattern for constructing
certain types of parsers, which makes essential use of first-class
functions.
Quotes of the Week
* mauke: a hint to beginners: typing 'fix error' in ghci does not
have the intended effect.
* mauke: Hungarian Notation constructs a type system in the mind of
the programmer.
* rwbarton: I was hoping for a pile of Functors.
* Baughn: [on lambdabot] Yes, PMS is a real issue. Poor memory size,
that is.
* Cale: There should be a website called "Static Equilibrium or Not"
where you rate pictures according to whether you think the depicted
objects are in static equilibrium.
* sahko: xmonad is an ancient african word for "you dont need to use
a mouse fool".
* doidydoidy: Category theory is exactly like a comic book
alternative universe, except they use the prefix "co-" instead of
"bizarro".
About the Haskell Weekly News
New editions are posted to [70]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
[71]the Haskell Sequence and [72]Planet Haskell. [73]RSS is also
available, and headlines appear on [74]haskell.org. Headlines are
available as [75]PDF.
To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
information on [76]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas
dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
[77]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .
References
1. http://haskell.org/
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4. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel
5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42643
6. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/RandomDotOrg
7. http://random.org/
8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42629
9. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/mueval
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13. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Hipmunk
14. http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Chipmunk
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17. http://quantile95.com/2008/07/24/addressing-haskell-blas-performance-issues/
18. http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~patperry/code/blas/
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22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/interleavableIO
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24. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008
25. http://code.haskell.org/hoogle/
26. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-9.html
27. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-7-progress-respect-my-formatting.html
28. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hpysics
29. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell
30. http://code.haskell.org/~Saizan/cabal
31. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c/wiki/
32. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApiStatus
33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/14800
34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9672
35. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42677
36. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42639
37. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42616
38. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42510
39. http://planet.haskell.org/
40. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
41. http://blog.malde.org/index.php/2008/07/31/updates-and-other-trivialities/
42. http://caos.di.uminho.pt/~ulisses/blog/2008/07/31/lexyacc/
43. http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog.php?id=1107301690
44. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/07/simple-random-numbers-in-haskell.html
45. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-7-progress-respect-my-formatting.html
46. http://blog.tupil.com/formlets-in-haskell/
47. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/736-Seen-in-the-Haskell-wiki.html
48. http://caos.di.uminho.pt/~ulisses/blog/2008/07/30/type-inference/
49. http://obfuscatedcode.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/icfp-contest-2008-the-one-liners/
50. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/355
51. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2008/07/29#batteries
52. http://devhawk.net/2008/07/30/Monadic+Philosophy+Part+2+The+LINQ+Monad.aspx
53. http://devhawk.net/2008/07/30/Monadic+Philosophy.aspx
54. http://caos.di.uminho.pt/~ulisses/blog/2008/07/29/pointfree-calculator/
55. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/07/pandoc-gets-mediawiki-support.html
56. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/07/fibonacci-numbers-coalgebraicaly.html
57. http://twan.home.fmf.nl/blog/haskell/Nonograms.details
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59. http://www.5min.com/Video/Ayumilove-Haskell-Programming-Tutorial-Part-2-B-31824556
60. http://www.5min.com/Video/Ayumilove-Haskell-Programming-Tutorial-Part-3-31855373
61. http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/t5120_donated_to_haskell_community
62. http://blog.mikael.johanssons.org/archive/2008/07/blackbox-computing-of-a-infinity-algebras/
63. http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3869
64. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/733-OSCon-Update.html
65. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/07/16/beta-availability-hiccups/
66. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/732-First-2-Days-of-OSCon.html
67. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-9.html
68. http://quantile95.com/2008/07/24/addressing-haskell-blas-performance-issues/
69. http://www.hvergi.net/2008/07/parsing-annotated-postfix-operators-with-haskell/
70. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
71. http://sequence.complete.org/
72. http://planet.haskell.org/
73. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
74. http://haskell.org/
75. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/archives/20080731.pdf
76. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
77. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/
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