[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 158 - November 10, 2010

[Daniel Santa Cruz]

   Welcome to issue 158 of the HWN, a newsletter covering developments in
   the [1]Haskell community in the week of October 31 - November 06.

   I'd like to start things off with a quote from Jeremy O'Donoghue this
   past week on a thread that produced plenty of laughs:

     Haskell was developed by Isaac Newton in the 15th Century as a tool
     to help his investigations into the Alchemic arts. It was
     rediscovered in the 1980s by three Cambridge undergraduates who were
     browsing through Newton's laboratory notebooks looking for smutty
     jokes in the margins, and has since developed into an elaborate joke
     perpetrated by elite computer scientists who believe that
     predictable order of execution is contrary to natural law. The
     current version of Haskell is Haskell 1714, which adds syntactic
     sugar for Zygohistomorphic Premorphisms to the original language
     definition of 1693.

   This week we had 378 messages posted to Haskell-Cafe (up 76 from last
   week!), 30 stories posted to Reddit (1 more than last week), 40
   questions posted to StackOverflow (15 more than last week), and 96
   updates to Hackage (11 more than last week). Busy busy week!

   From all the noise in the intertubes, it sounds like BelHac was
   awesome. There were plenty of kudos to Jasper Van der Jeugt for how
   well things went. Jasper posted a [2]summary blog, and we also have
   some [3]pictures from the event.

Announcements

   Will Sonnex [4]updated Zeno, a fully automated inductive theorem
   proving tool for Haskell programs.

   Gregory D. Weber [5]updated Sifflet, a visual, functional programming
   language and support system for students learning about recursion.

   Mario BlaževiÄ/= [6]updated monad-coroutine and SCC to version 0.6.
   The monad-coroutine package exports a generic monad transformer:
   Coroutine: Functor s => MonadTrans (Coroutine s).

   Johan Tibell informed us that he has [7]merged network-bytestring into
   the network package. This means that efficient and correct networking
   using ByteString is available as part of the standard network package.

   By far, the most popular thread this week in -cafe was a thread
   entitled [8]"Haskell is a scripting language inspired by Python." As
   you can imagine, many could not resist! The thread diverted into some
   interesting historical notes about Haskell.

Top Reddit Stories

   * Learn You a Haskell: Zippers
     Domain: learnyouahaskell.com
     Score: 91, Comments: 44
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e0qqz/learn_you_a_haskell_zippers/
     Original: http://learnyouahaskell.com/zippers

   * Neat Haskell commenting trick
     Domain: self.haskell
     Score: 78, Comments: 6
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/dyvsi/neat_haskell_commenting_trick/
     Original: /r/haskell/comments/dyvsi/neat_haskell_commenting_trick/

   * Haskell Halloween!
     Domain: i.imgur.com
     Score: 53, Comments: 5
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/dyznc/haskell_halloween/
     Original: http://i.imgur.com/t7qWf.jpg

   * Circular wavefronts
     Domain: claudiusmaximus.goto10.org
     Score: 39, Comments: 3
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e02vp/circular_wavefronts/
     Original: http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org/cm/2010-11-02_circular_wavefronts.html

   * Optimizing Haskell Loops With LLVM
     Domain: dmpots.com
     Score: 35, Comments: 1
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e1yfn/optimizing_haskell_loops_with_llvm/
     Original: http://www.dmpots.com/blog/2010/11/05/optimizing-haskell-loops-with-llvm.html

   * Obtaining the name of a function in Haskell
     Domain: mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com
     Score: 24, Comments: 3
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e1i3q/obtaining_the_name_of_a_function_in_haskell/
     Original: http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2010/11/obtaining-name-of-function-in-haskell.html

   * Generative Type Abstraction and Type-level Computation
     Domain: cis.upenn.edu
     Score: 17, Comments: 2
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/dzx80/generative_type_abstraction_and_typelevel/
     Original: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sweirich/newtypes.pdf

   * Relations rather than functions - where to learn about them?
     Domain: self.haskell
     Score: 17, Comments: 17
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e1520/relations_rather_than_functions_where_to_learn/
     Original: /r/haskell/comments/e1520/relations_rather_than_functions_where_to_learn/

   * Haskellers.com: Special Interest Groups feature active
     Domain: haskellers.com
     Score: 16, Comments: 2
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/dzkel/haskellerscom_special_interest_groups_feature/
     Original: http://www.haskellers.com/news/6/

   * The Utrecht Haskell Compiler now in github
     Domain: github.com
     Score: 16, Comments: 2
     On Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e26ar/the_utrecht_haskell_compiler_now_in_github/
     Original: https://github.com/uhc/uhc

Top StackOverflow Questions

   * how to do this in haskell?
     Question (votes: 0, answers: 1):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4106247/how-to-do-this-in-haskell

   * Haskell define Merge using mapReduce
     Question (votes: 0, answers: 1):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4099627/haskell-define-merge-using-mapreduce

   * Real GHC RTS memory usage
     Question (votes: 0, answers: 1):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4088351/real-ghc-rts-memory-usage

   * reading file and accessing in haskell (functional programming language)
     Question (votes: 0, answers: 2):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4074342/reading-file-and-accessing-in-haskell-functional-programming-language

   * Converting tree types
     Question (votes: 0, answers: 2):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4073091/converting-tree-types

   * Printing Binary Tree per Layer in a List
     Question (votes: 0, answers: 3):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4068681/printing-binary-tree-per-layer-in-a-list

   * Comparing Bool Value in Matrix
     Question (votes: 0, answers: 2):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4063553/comparing-bool-value-in-matrix

   * Converting Int to Integer
     Question (votes: 0, answers: 3):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4061777/converting-int-to-integer

   * Integrating Haskell with .Net?
     Question (votes: 1, answers: 3):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4111467/integrating-haskell-with-net

   * Putting existentials into monad
     Question (votes: 1, answers: 1):
     Read on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4106793/putting-existentials-into-monad

Quotes of the week

     * Luke Palmer:Also they "don't scale well", which I guess means that
       they don't make it inconvenient to design badly.
     * merijn: <dankna> someday we'll need meta-software that converts
       from obsolete languages into modern ones <merijn> Don't we call
       that compilers?
     * dolio: Let's spawn a thread every time we want to and two booleans.
     * ray: how about a language where you program with unit vectors:
       orientation oriented programming
     * Axman6: Haskell is easy, you just apply functions to arguments, and
       then you apply them to other arguments. Axman6's girlfriend: I
       don't like conflict
     * monochrom: in soviet haskell, functions run you
     * geheimdienst: in soviet russia, i remember lambdabot's quotes
     * Funktorsalat: sum is just the free monoid functor applied to the
       mediating arrow of the terminality of ()
     * geheimdienst: ah, yes. now we have to make a lambdacat captioned
       "kittehs no bery gud at speling. we says leksah fur lexer and monad
       fur moniod in catagory of ennobunktors"
     * Vanadium: That tripped my C++ highlight.
     * jmcarthur: what you just typed isn't even well typed

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [9]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [10]the Haskell Sequence and [11]Planet Haskell. [12]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [13]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please send stories to
   dstcruz * at * gmail * dot * com. The code used to produce this version
   of the newsletter is not yet publicly available, as it is a complete
   hack designed to get things started again.

   Until next time,
   Daniel Santa Cruz

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://jaspervdj.be/posts/2010-11-09-belhac-summary.html
   3. http://www.flickr.com/groups/1566670@N23/
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/18277
   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/18279
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/18281
   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/82798
   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/82995
   9. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  10. http://sequence.complete.org/
  11. http://planet.haskell.org/
  12. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  13. http://haskell.org/