[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 109 - March 14, 2009

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Sat Mar 14 09:58:27 EDT 2009


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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090314
Issue 109 - March 14, 2009
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   Welcome to issue 109 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   Congratulations to the authors of RWH on their [2]Jolt award! Some cool
   libraries released this week (as usual), and some really cool PhD
   [3]opportunities at Strathclyde. Also, it seems that I was censured
   last week for not including any quotes in the HWN, which is because
   tunes.org (which hosts the #haskell logs) was down while I was putting
   it together. So, this time I've included quotes going back two weeks, I
   HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY

Community News

   Tom DuBuisson (TomMD) has [4]moved to Portland and will be starting a
   PhD at Portland State soon.

Announcements

   darcs fundraising drive - only $720 left to go!. Eric Kow [5]announced
   that [6]donations are still being accepted to help pay for travel to
   the upcoming Haskell hackathon. So far we have raised $280, so we're
   almost a third of the way there. Think you can help?

   Vintage BASIC 1.0. Lyle Kopnicky [7]announced the initial release of
   [8]Vintage BASIC, an interpreter for microcomputer-era BASIC. Fully
   unit-tested, it faithfully implements the common elements of the
   language. On the web site, you can find 102 games from the classic book
   BASIC Computer Games, all of which run flawlessly. Have fun!

   ThreadScope: Request for features for the performance tuning of
   parallel and concurrent Haskell programs. Satnam Singh [9]requested
   feedback on infrastructure for logging run-time events and a graphical
   viewer program called [10]ThreadScope. The goal is for these features
   to make it into the next release of GHC.

   torch-0.1. Yusaku Hashimoto [11]announced a new unit test framework,
   [12]torch-0.1.

   sparsebit 0.5 - Sparse Bitmaps for Pattern Match Coverage. Ki Yung Ahn
   [13]announced the release of the [14]sparsebit library. This library
   packages the functional peal paper [15]Sparse Bitmaps for Pattern Match
   Coverage submitted to ICFP 2009 by Ki Yung Ahn and Tim Sheard.

   happs-tutorial 0.8. Crieghton Hogg [16]announced the release of
   [17]happs-tutorial 0.8, which is compatible with [18]happstack-0.2. A
   number of changes have occurred in this release, including general code
   cleanup, migration to the new Happstack.Server.SimpleHTTP API, and
   more.

   Future 1.1.0 concurrency library. ChrisK [19]announced the [20]future
   package, which ought to do what C++ standard futures/promises do, plus
   a bit more. The main operation is forkPromise :: IO a -> IO (Promise
   a), which sets the "IO a" operation running in a fresh thread; the
   eventual result can be accessed in many ways (non-blocking, blocking,
   blocking with timeout).

   Holumbus-MapReduce 0.0.1. Stefan Schmidt [21]announced three new
   libraries: [22]Holumbus-MapReduce, [23]Holumbus-Distribution, and
   [24]Holumbus-Storage, which provide tools for building distributed
   systems. These libraries are used as the backbone of the [25]Holumbus
   search engine.

   Turbinado V0.6. Alson Kemp [26]announced the release of [27]Turbinado
   0.6, a Rails-ish Model-View-Controller web serving framework for
   Haskell. New features include support for CGI serving, statically
   compiled Layouts, Views, and Controllers, lower case paths, support for
   cookies and encrypted cookie sessions, easier installation, and support
   for GHC 6.10.

   iteratee-0.1.0. John Lato [28]announced the hackage release of
   [29]iteratee-0.1.0. This library implements enumerators and iteratees
   [30]as proposed by Oleg Kiselyov.

   Harpy 0.4.4 - Runtime code generation for x86 machine code. Dirk
   Kleeblatt [31]announced the release of [32]Harpy 0.4.1, a library for
   runtime code generation for x86 machine code. The new release features
   additional Eq instances, support for new prefetching instructions, and
   some bug fixes.

Discussion

   Suggestion for a Haskell mascot. Maur�cio [33]suggested using a sloth
   as the Haskell mascot. If you would like to know how to say 'sloth' in
   just about every language ever, read this thread.

Jobs

   Microsoft PhD Scholarship at Strathclyde. Conor McBride [34]announced
   another PhD opportunity at Strathclyde, sponsored by Microsoft
   Research, to investigate the practical and theoretical impact of
   extending Haskell's type system with numeric expressions (representing
   sizes, or ranges, or costs, for example) and constraints capturing
   richer safety properties than are currently managed by static typing.

Blog noise

   [35]Haskell news from the [36]blogosphere.
     * Braden Shepherdson: [37]Pimp Your XMonad #4: Urgency Hooks.
     * Thomas M. DuBuisson: [38]Explicit Parallelism via Thread Pools.
     * Ketil Malde: [39]Current developments. Ongoing development of the
       biohaskell libraries for bioinformatics.
     * Philip Wadler: [40]Cafe Scientifique. Philip will be giving a talk,
       "Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century
       Computing", on Monday in Edinburgh.
     * Yi: [41]Yi 0.6.0 Release Notes.
     * Alson Kemp: [42]ANNOUNCE: Turbinado V0.6.
     * GHC / OpenSPARC Project: [43]Thread activity plotting.
     * Real-World Haskell: [44]We won a Jolt Award!.
     * Real-World Haskell: [45]Real World Haskell on the Kindle 2.
     * Christophe Poucet (vincenz): [46]Bootstrapping cabal.
     * Gtk2HS: [47]Mickinator File Manager.
     * Osfameron: [48](rough) Grids in Haskell. Some notes on representing
       2D grids in Haskell.
     * Manuel M T Chakravarty: [49]These graphs summarise the performance
       of Data Parallel Haskell....
     * GHC / OpenSPARC Project: [50]Project midpoint.
     * GHC / OpenSPARC Project: [51]The GNU Debugger and me.
     * Don Stewart (dons): [52]Evolving faster Haskell programs. Using
       genetic algorithms to find optimal flag combinations.
     * Xmonad: [53]Xmonad and the Gimp.
     * Xmonad: [54]xmonad on eee.
     * Mark Wassell: [55]Conversations with a type checker.
     * Holumbus: [56]Holumbus-MapReduce on Hackage. Some neat libraries
       for building distributed systems!
     * Darcs: [57]darcs weekly news #20.
     * Nick Mudge: [58]First Bay Area Haskell Meeting.
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [59]Dinatural Transformations and Coends.

Quotes of the Week

     * mmorrow: when i first saw haskell i was like "holy shitfork! that's
       what i've been trying to do in C for forever!"
     * pastah: the maybe monad is like cheating. everything is so
       awesomelly easy.
     * wli: Monads are like constipation. Comonads are like Ex-Lax.
     * TomMD: Never trust IO.
     * Axman6: let blah f x = f (blah f x) in blah ("blah "++) ""
     * MyCatVerbs: Lazy IO is implemented in terms of unsafePerformIO,
       you, you, you silly bipedal carbon-based organism.
     * MyCatVerbs: Amdahl's law is mostly to be used for making people
       feel depressed.
     * Axman6: -ddump-occur-anal <- another terrible name...
     * AchimSchneider: Finite automata don't go bottom in any case, at
       least not if you don't happen to shoot them and their health drops
       below zero.
     * ski: the truth (semantics), the whole truth (completeness), and
       nothing but the truth (soundness)
     * f4hy: wait you can do a show on an infinite list?! (I am starting
       to think haskell is not a programming language, it is evil
       wizardry)
     * Baughn: concat $ forM [(1,2), (4,5)] $ \(a,b) -> show (b,a+b)

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [60]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [61]the Haskell Sequence and [62]Planet Haskell. [63]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [64]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [65]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [66]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2009/03/12/we-won-a-jolt-award/
   3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16944
   4. http://tommd.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/explicit-parallelism-via-thread-pools/
   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54758
   6. http://www.darcs.net/donations.html
   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54652
   8. http://www.vintage-basic.net/
   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54521
  10. http://raintown.org/threadscope
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54445
  12. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/torch
  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54436
  14. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/sparsebit
  15. http://kyagrd.dyndns.org/wiki/SparseBitmapsForPatternMatchCoverage
  16. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-March/057305.html
  17. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/happs%2Dtutorial
  18. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/happstack
  19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54409
  20. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/future
  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54325
  22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Holumbus%2DMapReduce
  23. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Holumbus-Distribution
  24. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Holumbus-Storage
  25. http://www.holumbus.org/redmine/wiki/holumbus
  26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16953
  27. http://www.turbinado.org/
  28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16945
  29. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/iteratee
  30. http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/Iteratee/
  31. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16942
  32. http://uebb.cs.tu-berlin.de/harpy/
  33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54418
  34. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16944
  35. http://planet.haskell.org/
  36. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  37. http://braincrater.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/pimp-your-xmonad-4-urgency-hooks/
  38. http://tommd.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/explicit-parallelism-via-thread-pools/
  39. http://blog.malde.org/index.php/2009/03/13/current-developments/
  40. http://wadler.blogspot.com/2009/03/cafe-scientifique.html
  41. http://yi-editor.blogspot.com/2009/03/yi-060-release-notes.html
  42. http://www.alsonkemp.com/haskell/announce-turbinado-v06/
  43. http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2009/03/thread-activity-plotting.html
  44. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2009/03/12/we-won-a-jolt-award/
  45. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2009/03/13/real-world-haskell-on-the-kindle-2/
  46. http://cpoucet.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/bootstrapping-cabal/
  47. http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/archives/2009/03/10/mickinator-file-manager/
  48. http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/03/10/rough-grids-in-haskell/
  49. http://justtesting.org/post/85103645
  50. http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2009/03/project-midpoint.html
  51. http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2009/03/gnu-debugger-and-me.html
  52. http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/evolving-faster-haskell-programs/
  53. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/xmonad-and-the-gimp/
  54. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/xmonad-on-eee/
  55. http://www.poundstone.org/blog/?p=23
  56. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/blog/?p=18
  57. http://blog.darcs.net/2009/03/darcs-weekly-news-20.html
  58. http://nickmudge.info/?post=115
  59. http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/03/dinatural-transformations-and-coends.html
  60. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  61. http://sequence.complete.org/
  62. http://planet.haskell.org/
  63. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  64. http://haskell.org/
  65. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  66. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/


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