[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News

Kim-Ee Yeoh ky3 at atamo.com
Fri May 1 07:16:00 UTC 2015


*Top Picks:*

   - Haskell wins a bumper crop of 18 accepted Google Summer of Code
   proposals
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/342rvp/google_summer_of_code_18_projects_accepted/>.
   Mentor offers total 44, another thumpin' sign of life. Kudos to Edward
   Kmett, Johan Tibell, Shachaf Ben-Kiki, and Gershom Bazerman. Gloria
   Haskella sine labore nulla.

   - Reddit Haskell celebrates
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/33wnf1/20k_rhaskell_subscribers_nice/>
   20k subscribers. It's the 7th largest PL community on reddit
   <https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/wiki/faq#wiki_what_language_reddits_are_there.3F>
   after python, javascript, java, php, ruby, c++, in that order.

   - Matthew Griffith
   <http://mechanical-elephant.com/thoughts/2015-04-20-becoming-productive-in-haskell/>
   migrates away from Python: "I do most of my web prototyping in Haskell
   now." A journey vividly logged and much loved on Hacker News
   <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431944>. And also on Proggit
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/33oyx9/becoming_productive_in_haskell/>
   and Reddit Haskell
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/33mnlc/becoming_productive_in_haskell_coming_from_python/>
   .

   - A web developer migrates away from Rails to Haskell and explains on HN
   the 10x advantage
   <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419601#up_9420448> he reaps.

   - Fancy Python in Haskell dress? Check out Dogelang
   <http://pyos.github.io/dg/>, charmingly defiant: "With Haskell's syntax
   but none of its type system, dg is the best way to make fans of static
   typing shut up already." Proggit kibbitzing here
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/33kleg/dg_its_a_python_no_its_a_haskell/>,
   HN there <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432383>.

   - Caio Rordrigues copiously illustrates
   <https://github.com/caiorss/Functional-Programming> Haskell programming.
   Pretty: a tax bracket tool
   <https://github.com/caiorss/Functional-Programming#tax-brackets>
and a coffee
   shop Point-of-Sale DSL
   <https://github.com/caiorss/Functional-Programming#small-dsl-domain-specific-language>.
   It's almost a whole book!

   - Christian Marie starts the ball rolling on library cheatsheets
   <https://github.com/anchor/haskell-cheat-sheets/> to guide your way
   through the jungle of hackage. Moar, moar!
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/33sc98/haskell_cheat_sheets_for_common_library/>

   - Got a C library you'd love Haskell bindings for? Remember Ian Ross and
   his new C2HS release
   <http://haskell.1045720.n5.nabble.com/Haskell-Weekly-News-td5768107.html>?
   Well, Ian's happy
   <http://haskell.1045720.n5.nabble.com/Tutorial-Ideas-td5808049.html> to
   do it for you. Provisos
   <http://www.skybluetrades.net/blog/posts/2015/04/27/c2hs-tutorial-request.html>
   apply.

   - Olle Fredriksson announces a combinator-based Earley parsing library
   <https://github.com/ollef/Earley> which accepts context-free but not
   context-sensitive (monadic parsing) grammars. Discussion
   <https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/33l9cr/ann_earley_parsing_library/>
   reveals that "one enormously important difference for this library is that
   it reports all possible parses."

   - Another Lennart, last name Spitzner, creates another genie that turns
   type signatures into programs. Unlike Djinn, Exference
   <http://haskell.1045720.n5.nabble.com/ANN-exference-a-different-djinn-td5807986.html>
   makes no promises over termination. "Your wish is my command even at the
   expense of closure."

   - Like Agda? You can now enjoy the hole-driven development style in
   Haskell, brought to you courtesy of Mote by Izaak Meckler
   <https://github.com/imeckler/mote>. Discussion here
   <https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/33v4nm/ann_mote_a_tool_bringing_holedriven_development/>
   .


   <http://tomassetti.me/an-erd-web-server-generation-entity-diagrams-from-a-textual-description-with-haskell/>
   - Federico Tomassetti
   <http://tomassetti.me/an-erd-web-server-generation-entity-diagrams-from-a-textual-description-with-haskell/>
   creates a web-based interface to Andrew Gallant's erd tool
   <https://github.com/BurntSushi/erd>. Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERD)
   come from the database world and help visualize {one,many} to {one,many}
   relationships. Federico's web app enables him to use erd everywhere without
   having to install the tool chain multiple times.

   - Mark Dominus gives a beginner spin
   <http://blog.plover.com/prog/haskell/monad-search.html> to the chestnut
   of SEND + MORE = MONEY <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_arithmetic>.
   This puzzle site
   <http://programmingpraxis.com/2012/07/31/send-more-money-part-1/> has
   comparisons with other languages.

   - Got a number system? Flip it into a data structure
   <https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/edwardk/fibonacci/leonardo>. Re-flip it
   into an efficient search algorithm
   <https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/edwardk/fibonacci/search>. Edward Kmett
   shows you how. Respective discussion here
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/342s31/edward_kmett_leonardo_random_access_lists/>
   and here
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/346b6t/edward_kmett_openended_fibonacci_search/>
   .



*In Memoriam*

   - A key founder of Haskell, Professor Paul Hudak, completed
   <http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/04/30/hudak-spirited-saybrugian-and-cs-prof-succumbs-to-cancer/>
   his end-of-life plan
   <http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/hudak/journal/view/id/5538f5cea589b4216c04438a>
   after a five-year encounter with leukemia. He stays
   <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431017> in the thoughts
   <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9465999> of all
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/33oe4b/holding_on_and_letting_go/>
   who cherish
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/34exz3/prof_hudak_passed_away_last_night/>
   his gifts
   <http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/34f19q/paul_hudak_creator_of_haskell_has_died/>
   from the heart.



*Quotes of the Week*

   - A type system flattens the cost of change curve
   <http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/costOfChange.htm>. -- Chad Austin
   <http://chadaustin.me/2015/04/the-long-term-problem-with-dynamically-typed-languages/>

   - The MLs and Haskell remind me of Brian Eno's line about how the first
   Velvet Underground album only sold 30,000 copies, but "everyone who bought
   one of those 30,000 copies started a band". -- Source
   <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431944#up_9437017>

   - On the value of Haskell
   <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445968#up_9448988>: I find I'm
   able to accomplish tasks which would otherwise be beyond my skill and
   intelligence. For example, even though C was the first language I learned,
   I can't imagine writing a parser in C after discovering the simplicity &
   readability of monadic parsing in Haskell.

   - Haskell's level of abstraction is so crazy that they can actually swap
   out their entire I/O system for another one without changing any
   application interfaces, this one blew my mind, it's the change that makes
   GHC 7.8 run the Warp webserver twice as fast. ... All of this without
   changing a line in Warp, they just transparently made every traditional
   Haskell use modern I/O principles. Academics man, they're smart ;) --
   Source <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419601#up_9432564>

   - An old man loved is winter with flowers. -- Edgar Z. Friedenberg



*Cool Beans of the Week*

   - Ravi Chugh and his fine team at U. Chicago just concluded stateside's
   first ever FRP-based FP course for undergrads using Elm. Check out
the student
   projects
   <https://www.classes.cs.uchicago.edu/archive/2015/winter/22300-1/Showcase.html>
   for inspiration on FRP architecture. Over in Bonn, Janis Voigtländer also
   gave such a course
   <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm-discuss/Qjs6sp3lZq0/8aa5bvYcdDYJ>
   that completed this year. Paul's legacy lives on.


p.s. Coming soon: Cabal Hell

-- Kim-Ee
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20150501/0d382bb6/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list