[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 144 - December 19, 2009

[jfredett at gmail.com]

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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20091219
Issue 144 - December 19, 2009
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   Welcome to issue 144 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   The big news this week is the release of the Glorious Glasgow Haskell
   compiler version 6.12.1, lots of exciting new improvements,
   congratulations from the whole community go out to the devs, good work
   GHC Team! Otherwise, this week has been quiet, with some interesting
   discussions about associated types and the new GHC, and some excellent
   new packages announced. Finally, due to the incoming holidays, there
   won't be an HWN for the next two weeks, I'll see you Haskellers in
   2010, until then, your Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

   GHC version 6.12.1. Ian Lynagh [2]announced the (Interactive) Glasgow
   Haskell Compiler, version 6.12.1. Including improved support for
   parallel execution, Dynamic linking support on Linux, and many other
   improvments.

   atom-0.1.4. Tom Hawkins [3]announced a bug fix release of the atom
   package, affecting floating point variable initialization.

   text 0.7, fast Unicode text. Bryan O'Sullivan [4]announced a new
   release of the text package adds support for Unicode I/O

   explicit-iomodes-0.1. Bas van Dijk [5]announced explicit-iomodes
   version 0.1, a wrapper around System.IO that provides a Handle type
   which is parametrized with the IOMode it is in.

   Hemkay, the 100% Haskell MOD player. Patai Gergely [6]announced a
   Hemkay, an old-school MOD player in pure Haskell.

   GT-VMT 2010: deadlines extended. Emilio Tuosto [7]announced a deadline
   extension to the GT-VMT call for papers.

Discussion

   Restrictions on associated types for classes. Stephen Lavelle [8]asked
   if there was a way to wrap a associated type in a class constraint.

   Yay 6.12.1! Evan Laforge [9]talked about some of the changes in the new
   version of GHC.

Blog noise

   [10]Haskell news from the [11]blogosphere. Blog posts from people new
   to the Haskell community are marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them!
     * Michael Snoyman: [12]data-object family.
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [13]Making GHC's I/O manager more scalable.
     * Conor McBride: [14]Epilogue for Epigram: 2+2=4.
     * Sebastian Fischer: [15]Thesis submitted.
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [16]Data.Text 0.7 gains I/O support.
     * Ketil Malde: [17]Searching for poly(A) tails.
     * Mark Jason Dominus: [18]Monads are like burritos.
     * Sean Leather: [19]"Upwards and downwards accumulations on trees"
       translated into Haskell.

Quotes of the Week

     * yrlnry: <byorgey> yrlnry: just some lady who had a lot of money and
       decided she wanted poor grad students to have some of it after she
       died... pretty nice of her, actually <yrlnry> senile dementia, more
       likely.
     * Philonous: A 'newbie', in Haskell, is someone who hasn't yet
       implemented a compiler. They've only written a monad tutorial.
     * kmc: Right, for example Either (pun not intended)
     * kmc: One thing I've learned from open-source software is that if
       you invent enough wheels, one of them will turn out to be round and
       capable of rolling.
     * PhilipWadler: To see that "in" and "out" are inverses, stare at the
       following diagram
     * kmc: Data.Map is like a C++ STL map<k,v>, without the suck
     * edwardkmett: Most monad tutorials are written by people who barely
       understand monads, if at all, but unfortunately nothing can stop
       someone from writing a monad tutorial. We've tried, there was blood
       everywhere.
     * Cale: A small category is a monad in the 2-category of spans of
       sets.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [20]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [21]the Haskell Sequence and [22]Planet Haskell. [23]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [24]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [25]how to contribute. Send stories to jfredett . at .
   gmail . dot . com. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [26]http://patch-tag.com/r/jfredett/HWN2/pullrepo HWN2 .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17678
   3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/68009
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/67946
   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/67931
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/67923
   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17676
   8. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/68084
   9. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/67950
  10. http://planet.haskell.org/
  11. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  12. http://snoyberg.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/data-object-family/
  13. http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2009/12/17/making-ghcs-io-manager-more-scalable/
  14. http://www.e-pig.org/epilogue/?p=266
  15. http://www-ps.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~sebf/haskell/thesis.html
  16. http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2009/12/15/data-text-0-7-gains-io-support/
  17. http://blog.malde.org/index.php/2009/12/14/searching-for-polya-tails/
  18. http://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html
  19. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/splonderzoek/~3/4E8TZPDZ-aM/upwards-and-downwards-accumulations-on.html
  20. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  21. http://sequence.complete.org/
  22. http://planet.haskell.org/
  23. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  24. http://haskell.org/
  25. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  26. http://patch-tag.com/r/jfredett/HWN2/pullrepo%20HWN2