[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 86 - September 20, 2008

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Sat Sep 20 11:25:54 EDT 2008 

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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080920
Issue 86 - September 20, 2008
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   Welcome to issue 86 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   Lots of NEW stuff this week! A new generics library, new versions of
   Pandoc and darcs, a new website for xmonad, a new GADT/type family
   inference engine for GHC, a Haskell binding for Qt, and some new,
   astonishingly elegant ideas from Oleg. Also, here's hoping that
   everyone has a lot of fun at ICFP!

Announcements

   GHC version control. Simon Peyton-Jones [2]sent out a revised proposal
   for GHC version control.

   darcs 2.0.3pre1. Eric Kow [3]announced the first pre-release of
   [4]darcs 2.0.3, featuring a few major bug fixes and a handful of
   interesting features.

   EMGM. Sean Leather [5]announced a release of [6]Extensible and Modular
   Generics for the Masses (EMGM), a library for generic programming in
   Haskell using type classes.

   Pandoc 1.0.0.1. John MacFarlane [7]announced the release of [8]pandoc
   1.0.0.1, the swiss army knife of text markup formats.

   Iteratee-based IO. oleg [9]described a [10]safe, declarative approach
   to input processing which will be the subject of a talk at DEFUN08 on
   September 27.

   MetaHDBC paper. Mads Lindstroem [11]announced a [12]draft version of a
   paper about the [13]MetaHDBC library, which uses Template Haskell to do
   type-safe database access. Comments are welcomed, especially about the
   overall quality of the paper, whether it can be called scientific, and
   anything Mads could do to improve the paper.

   qtHaskell 1.1.2. David Harley [14]announced a second preview release of
   [15]qtHaskell, a set of Haskell bindings for Trolltech's Qt.

Discussion

   Library design question. Andre Nathan [16]asked for advice on designing
   a simple graph library. The resulting discussion included an analysis
   of using the State monad versus a more functional approach.

   A round of golf. Creighton Hogg [17]learns about laziness by [18]making
   grown men cry.

   XML (HXML) parsing :: GHC 6.8.3 space leak from 2000. Lev Walkin
   [19]discovers a nice example of an obscure class of space leaks while
   writing some XML-processing code, prompting an in-depth analysis by
   Simon Marlow.

   Proofs and commercial code. Daryoush Mehrtash [20]asked about automated
   proof tools and techniques, and their uses in the real world.

Blog noise

   [21]Haskell news from the [22]blogosphere.
     * Creighton Hogg: [23]Haskell Cafe or: How I learned to stop worrying
       & love laziness.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [24]Animal as RDR, part II. Doug
       continues his posts on RDR expert systems.
     * Ivan Lazar Miljenovic: [25]Getting Real World Haskell Down Under.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [26]Animal: an RDR implementation
       study. Doug describes "ripple-down rules" expert systems, and
       illustrates the types needed to encode one in Haskell.
     * Mark Jason Dominus: [27]data Mu f = In (f (Mu f)). Mark writes
       about fixpoints of type constructors.
     * John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [28]Switched from KDE to xmonad. John has
       taken the plunge to xmonad and seems to like it so far!
     * Eric Kow (kowey): [29]darcs weekly news #4. Pre-release of darcs
       2.0.3; darcs hacking sprint next month; code.haskell.org upgrades
       to darcs 2; and other news.
     * Mads Lindstroem: [30]MetaHDBC paper (draft). Mads's first paper
       ever, on using Template Haskell for type-safe database access.
       Comments welcome!
     * Braden Shepherdson: [31]xmonad-light 0.8 Released.
     * Manuel M T Chakravarty: [32]GHC HEAD just got a new inference
       engine for GADTs and type families..
     * Magnus Therning: [33]Haskell and Time. Magnus describes the
       solution to a problem with Data.Time.
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [34]Two Papers and a Presentation.
     * Xmonad: [35]New xmonad website launched. xmonad has a shiny new
       website!

Quotes of the Week

     * Botje: GHC 11 will have shootout entries as primitives.
     * wjt: oh, i see what you're doing. ...no, i don't. *splode*
     * Benjamin Pierce: [on existential types] I have a term, and it has a
       type. So there.
     * bos: come on, real programmers use "(((,) <$>) .) . (<*>)"
     * quicksilver: #haskell : Sometimes we answer your question,
       sometimes we lay hideous traps which will devour your soul. It's a
       risk you take.
     * harrison: [on computing 1000000!] it is the same as factorial
       999999 * 1000000, big deal

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [36]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [37]the Haskell Sequence and [38]Planet Haskell. [39]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [40]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [41]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [42]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/libraries/2008-September/010661.html
   3. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047664.html
   4. http://www.darcs.net/darcs-2.0.3pre1.tar.gz
   5. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047751.html
   6. http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/GenericProgramming/EMGM
   7. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047437.html
   8. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/pandoc
   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44828
  10. http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/Iteratee/
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44713
  12. http://lindstroem.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/metahdbc.pdf
  13. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/MetaHDBC
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16425
  15. http://qthaskell.berlios.de/
  16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44733
  17. http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/09/haskell-cafe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop.html
  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44724
  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44708
  20. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047440.html
  21. http://planet.haskell.org/
  22. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  23. http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/09/haskell-cafe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop.html
  24. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/animal-as-rdr-part-ii.html
  25. http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/getting-real-world-haskell-down-under/
  26. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/animal-rdr-implementation-study.html
  27. http://blog.plover.com/prog/springschool95-2.html
  28. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/756-Switched-from-KDE-to-xmonad.html
  29. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/09/darcs-weekly-news-4.html
  30. http://lindstroem.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/metahdbc-paper-draft/
  31. http://braincrater.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/xmonad-light-08-released/
  32. http://justtesting.org/post/50500880
  33. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/389
  34. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/09/two-papers-and-presentation.html
  35. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/new-xmonad-website-launched/
  36. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  37. http://sequence.complete.org/
  38. http://planet.haskell.org/
  39. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  40. http://haskell.org/
  41. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  42. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/

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