[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 93 - November 15, 2008

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Sat Nov 15 15:55:52 EST 2008


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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20081115
Issue 93 - November 15, 2008
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   Welcome to issue 93 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

Community News

   Congratulations to Ganesh (aka Heffalump) and Amanda on the [2]birth of
   Alexander Suresh Kerr Sittampalam!

Announcements

   bustle-0.1. Will Thompson [3]announced the [4]release of [5]Bustle, a
   tool to show diagrams of D-Bus traffic for profiling purposes. It
   consists of a small C executable to log traffic, and a Gtk+ application
   which draws diagrams using Cairo.

   haskell-src-exts 0.4.1. Niklas Broberg [6]announced a new major release
   of the [7]haskell-src-exts package, an extension of the standard
   haskell-src package which handles most common syntactic extensions to
   Haskell. The new release features a cleaned up AST and names without
   ugly disambiguation prefixes.

   darcs 2.1.1rc2. Eric Kow (kowey) [8]announced the release of [9]darcs
   2.1.1rc2, which adds support for GHC 6.10.1. It also includes a Windows
   bug fix. If you're using GHC 6.10.1 or Windows, give it a try and let
   the darcs development team know how it works.

   hpapi 0.1 release. Michael D. Adams [10]announced the first release of
   [11]hpapi, Performance API (PAPI) bindings for Haskell. PAPI provides
   access to various CPU counters such as cache-miss, instruction and
   pipeline stall counts.

   Workflow-0.1. Alberto G. Corona [12]announced the release of
   [13]Workflow, a library for transparent execution of computations
   across shutdowns and restarts.

   Reactive library (FRP) and mailing list. Conal Elliott [14]announced
   the release of [15]Reactive, a library for functional reactive
   programming (FRP), similar to the original [16]Fran but with a more
   modern interface (using standard type classes) and a hybrid push/pull
   implementation. It is designed to be used in a variety of contexts,
   such as interactive 2D and 3D graphics, graphical user interfaces, web
   services, and automatic recompilation/re-execution. There is also now a
   [17]mailing list and a [18]feature/bug tracker.

   ANN (sorta): OpenGL with extra type safety. Neal Alexander
   [19]announced a modification of the hOpenGL (and GLFW) source tree to
   force extra type checking on its various IO actions using the
   -XGeneralizedNewtypeDeriving extension. The main motivation was for
   writing concurrent OpenGL applications; the second motivation was to
   enforce static type checking on commands that can only be executed in
   certain OpenGL contexts (sending vertex data for example). Hopefully
   the code will be uploaded to Hackage as a separate package soon.

   FieldTrip library (functional 3D) and mailing list. Conal Elliott
   [20]announced the release of [21]FieldTrip, a library for functional 3D
   graphics. It is intended for building static, animated, and interactive
   3D geometry, efficient enough for real-time synthesis and display.
   FieldTrip also has a [22]mailing list and a [23]feature/bug tracker.

   gitit 0.2 release - wiki using HAppS, git, pandoc. John MacFarlane
   [24]announced the upload of an early version of [25]gitit, a Haskell
   wiki program, to HackageDB. Gitit uses HAppS as a webserver, git for
   file storage, pandoc for rendering the (markdown) pages, and
   highlighting-kate for highlighted source code. You can [26]try it out
   here. Comments and patches welcome.

Discussion

   Proof that Haskell is RT. Andrew Birkett [27]asked whether there exists
   a formal proof that the Haskell language is referentially transparent.
   Such a thing cannot exist, since Haskell has no formally defined
   semantics, but an interesting discussion about referential transparency
   and semantics ensued anyway.

   What *not* to use Haskell for. Dave Tapley [28]asked how people answer
   the question, "what does Haskell not do well?" Unfortunately, it seems
   that there is no good answer to this question and the thread
   degenerated into a discussion of all the great things you can do with
   Haskell. If only Haskell sucked more.

Blog noise

   [29]Haskell news from the [30]blogosphere.
     * Braden Shepherdson: [31]Pimp Your XMonad #2: SmartBorders. The
       second in Braden's series on customising xmonad explains how to use
       the NoBorders extension to get rid of window borders when you don't
       want them.
     * Real-World Haskell: [32]Real World Haskell Electronic Edition Now
       On Sale.
     * Conal Elliott: [33]More beautiful fold zipping.
     * >>> Stephen: [34]Endless Cavern. A procedurally-generated
       tessellated-cavern flying game.
     * Twan van Laarhoven: [35]Arrays without bounds. Unbounded arrays
       (with O(1) amortized access) in Haskell!
     * "The GHC Team": [36]Comparing concurrent linked-list
       implementations in Haskell.
     * Ketil Malde: [37]454 sequencing and parsing the SFF binary format.
     * Tom Schrijvers: [38]Type Invariants for Haskell. Tom, Louis-Julien
       Guillemette, and Stefan Monnier's paper on Type Invariants for
       Haskell, which was recently accepted at PLPV'09.
     * Conal Elliott: [39]Another lovely example of type class morphisms.
       Conal elaborates on Max Rabkin's recent post on composable folds.
     * Real-World Haskell: [40]Beautiful Parallelism: Harnessing
       Multicores with Haskell. Don Stewart will be talking about
       programming mainstream multicore systems with Haskell at SC'08 next
       week in Austin, Texas.
     * Luke Palmer: [41]Sketch of Udon (Version Control/Packaging system).
       Luke sketches a high-level design for a distributed storage system
       that could be used as the basis for solving a number of interesting
       problems.
     * Galois, Inc: [42]Galois awarded NASA research contract.
     * Mark Jason Dominus: [43]Representing ordinal numbers in the
       computer and elsewhere.
     * The GHC Team: [44]Bootstrapping cabal-install.
     * Jason Dagit: [45]Phantom Types, Existentials and Controlling
       Unification -- Part 1.
     * Ben Moseley: [46]Why does Functional Programming matter?.

Quotes of the Week

     * BMeph: In a functional world, students would ask how that index
       shadowing works in those funny 'for' statements...
     * digit: i'm almost annoyed at how brilliant xmonad is.
     * _pizza_: i think Haskell is undoubtedly the world's best
       programming language for discovering the first few dozen numbers in
       the Fibonacci sequence over IRC.
     * adu: let uncat3 [] = [] ; uncat3 xs = (let (ys, zs) = splitAt 3 xs
       in ys : uncat3 zs) ; getFrom x y = map (x !!) $ map (fromIntegral .
       ((\x -> fromIntegral $ foldl (.|.) (0::Word8) (zipWith (\c n -> if
       c then bit n else (0::Word8)) x [0..2])) :: [Bool] -> Int)) $
       reverse . uncat3 . reverse . concat . map (((\x -> map (testBit x)
       [7,6..0]) :: Word8 -> [Bool]) . fromIntegral . ord) $ y in getFrom
       " HWdelor" "e\184-\235"
     * Beelsebob: ((:[]) "pigs eat") <^(++)^> ((:[]) " robot monkies")

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [47]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [48]the Haskell Sequence and [49]Planet Haskell. [50]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [51]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [52]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [53]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://urchin.earth.li/aegean/baby/
   3. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-November/050626.html
   4. http://people.collabora.co.uk/~wjt/bustle/releases/bustle-0.1.tar.gz
   5. http://resiak.livejournal.com/59590.html
   6. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-November/050634.html
   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskell-src-exts-0.4.1
   8. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-November/050378.html
   9. http://darcs.net/darcs-2.1.1rc2.tar.gz
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16612
  11. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hpapi
  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16607
  13. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Workflow
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16604
  15. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Reactive
  16. http://conal.net/Fran
  17. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/reactive
  18. http://trac.haskell.org/reactive
  19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/47458
  20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/47416
  21. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/FieldTrip
  22. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/FieldTrip
  23. http://trac.haskell.org/FieldTrip
  24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/47384
  25. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/gitit
  26. http://johnmacfarlane.net:5001/
  27. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/47569
  28. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/47491
  29. http://planet.haskell.org/
  30. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  31. http://braincrater.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/pimp-your-xmonad-2-smartborders/
  32. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/11/15/real-world-haskell-electronic-edition-now-on-sale/
  33. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/conal/~3/453765396/
  34. http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~icecube/2008/11/endless-cavern/
  35. http://twan.home.fmf.nl/blog/haskell/UnboundedArray.details
  36. http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/comparing-concurrent-linked-list-implementations-in-haskell/
  37. http://blog.malde.org/index.php/2008/11/14/454-sequencing-and-parsing-the-sff-binary-format/
  38. http://tomschrijvers.blogspot.com/2008/11/type-invariants-for-haskell.html
  39. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/conal/~3/452607365/
  40. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/11/12/beautiful-parallelism-harnessing-multicores-with-haskell/
  41. http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/sketch-of-udon-version-controlpackaging-system/
  42. http://www.galois.com/blog/2008/11/11/galois-awarded-nasa-research-contract/
  43. http://blog.plover.com/math/ordinals.html
  44. http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/bootstrapping-cabal-install/
  45. http://blog.codersbase.com/2008/11/10/phantom-types-existentials-and-controlling-unification-part-1/
  46. http://nattermorphisms.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-does-functional-programming-matter.html
  47. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  48. http://sequence.complete.org/
  49. http://planet.haskell.org/
  50. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  51. http://haskell.org/
  52. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  53. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/


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