[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News

Kim-Ee Yeoh ky3 at atamo.com
Wed Mar 18 05:49:16 UTC 2015


*Top picks:*

   - Simon Marlow, who built much of GHC's runtime, now works at Facebook.
   He contributes to Haxl, a tool to "automatically batch and overlap requests
   for data from multiple data sources in a rule engine for identifying
   malicious content."

   In a talk last year at FP Days
   <http://fpdays.net/2014/sessions/index.php?session=21>, he explains how
   you too can use Haxl in your projects. The video was just made available
   at <http://www.infoq.com/presentations/remote-access-haxl> InfoQ
   <http://www.infoq.com/presentations/remote-access-haxl>. Hat-tip to
   redditor Pikachut
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2z049t/remote_access_made_easy_and_fast_with_haskell/>
   for links to slides
   <https://github.com/simonmar/fpdays14/blob/master/Haxl%20-%20FP%20Days%202014%20split.pdf?raw=true>
   and code <https://github.com/simonmar/fpdays14>.

   - GHC builds can be frightfully slow. Karel Gardas
   <http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.ghc.devel/8233>
   wonders how he can speedup builds on his 32-threaded SPARC T2000. Folks
   point him toward Andrey Mokhov's ongoing investigation
   <https://github.com/snowleopard/shaking-up-ghc> of Neil Mitchell's shake
   <http://community.haskell.org/~ndm/shake/> to replace GHC's current use
   of GNU make. SPJ hopes that it "will make a big difference."

   - Back in September last year, Ahmad Fatoum
   <https://github.com/haskell/win32/issues/24> asks whether we can fix the
   Win32 FFI so that it supports optional params? Some Win32 functions -- e.g.
   see FindWindow
   <https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms633499%28v=vs.85%29.aspx>
   -- accept NULL pointers as invocation of default behavior, currently
   impossible from Haskell.

   One option is to make copies of over 100 functions to prevent existing
   client code from breaking. A more radical one is to extend the existing FFI
   in-place and alter the type signatures by Maybe-fying the params that are
   actually optional.

   The vocal opinion is in favor of the latter, deeper fix. Yitzchak Gale
   <http://haskell.1045720.n5.nabble.com/Proposed-significant-breaking-changes-to-Win32-td5767150.html>
   recently brought up the issue on haskell-libraries.

   - Maurizio Vitale
   <http://haskell.1045720.n5.nabble.com/extracting-a-single-declaration-using-haskell-src-ext-td5767122.html>
   asks for a way to extract verbatim a single definition from Haskell
source. Michael
   Sloan shows a way to do it
   <https://gist.github.com/mgsloan/ac77dd33326322fc6ccd> using
   haskell-src-exts <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskell-src-exts>.

   - Conor McBride
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2y25ly/language_deriveapplicative/cp5pskn>
   discusses Naperian / Representable functors as a subclass of Applicative.
   Elsewhere in the thread, Ed Kmett remarks that "The Log of a coinductive
   container being an inductive type is a new result for me."

   - A subreddit called haskelltil <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskelltil/>
   (TIL = Today I Learned) for little discoveries was announced on haskell
   reddit
   <https://pay.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2zcnsl/haskelltil_a_subreddit_for_small_findings_and/>
   .


*Repo of the week: *Calvin Cheng <http://calvinx.com/about/>, co-founder
and CTO at AlgoAccess, releases code
<https://github.com/calvinchengx/learnhaskell> and slides
<http://www.slideshare.net/calvinchengx/functional-programming-part01> on
learning Haskell for the OO programmer.


*In your neighborhood:*

   - Kat Chuang organized an NYC-based study group
   <http://www.meetup.com/NY-Haskell/events/220997346/> to dissect Nishan
   Shukla's Haskell Data Analysis Cookbook <http://haskelldata.com/>. "This
   is your AHA! <https://github.com/ny-haskell/Action-Haskell-Analysis>
   Haskell Moment."

   - Redditor netroby
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2y4e0r/haskell_chinese_user_group_qq_group_haskellcn/>
   launched a QQ instant messaging group
   <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ>, code number 424801832, to
   talk Haskell.


*Quote of the week:*
Dimitri DeFigueiredo
<https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/beginners/2015-March/014900.html> says
about the haskell-beginners mailing list, "This is the friendliest mailing
list I have ever subscribed to. The people in this list are so nice that
even if Haskell were not so wonderfully elegant, I would like to learn it
just to be able to chat and work with them."

*Acknowledgments*
Thanks to Henk-Jan van Tuyl for help with the Quotes. Thanks to Gershom
Bazerman, Roman Cheplyaka, and Artyom for offering assistance on web
hosting HWN.

*Letter to the Editor:*
Can I just say that I'm very much in favour of the new format. There's
interesting content that can't just be gained from occasionally checking
reddit, there's an actual comment on each one rather than just the
headline, and most importantly the quote is still there ;)

Sorry if this is adding to a deluge of email that you're now getting
because of this.

Yours, Anon

*Response:*
Dear Anon,

Glad you're enjoying HWN as much as I do creating and publishing it.

I love the quotes too, and I depend on my readers to email me what they'd
like to share with Team Haskell.

(Sneak peak at the top-secret contingency plan: If I don't have quotes for
the week, I ransack the archives. Shhh!! Don't tell anyone.)

Yours is the only thank you I received. Appreciation like yours is what
keeps HWN going, so let me thank you in return for sharing the love, for I
remain

Yours editorially, Kim-Ee Yeoh

p.s. Stay tuned for an upcoming editorial on what the future holds for HWN.


-- Kim-Ee
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