[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 136 - October 17, 2009

jfredett at gmail.com jfredett at gmail.com
Sat Oct 17 00:53:21 EDT 2009


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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20091017
Issue 136 - October 17, 2009
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   Welcome to issue 136 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   Over the last week, fpisfun from reddit announced a [2]new subreddit
   for simple, direct applications of Haskell to common problems which
   normally might be solved by a perl script or bit of bash. There are a
   number of examples already there, and the numbers keep growing. It's
   not just command-line utilities either, there is also [3]this post on
   calculating the bend needed for a bay window curtainrod. There is
   plenty of great material if you're new to Haskell and looking for some
   basic examples of different simple projects, examples of using monads
   and functors appropriately, or just want to see some 'real' programs in
   Haskell, it's worth a look!

   Also, a small correction, due to some issues with the tools, unicode
   characters get replaced with their ASCII 'equivalents' so that an 'e'
   with an umlaut becomes an 'e' character. Thanks to Wolfram Kahl for
   pointing out that this change is not as innocent as I thought,
   apologies thusly to Guenther Schmidt (I'm told thats a better
   approximation of the correct spelling) for the error, I apologize in
   advance for any other similar errors. I'm working on improving the
   unicode support in the tools, but it's a nasty bug to catch.

   This was a long editorial, so I won't take any more of your time,
   Haskellers, the Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

   Call for Contributions - Haskell Communities and Activities Report,
   November 2009 edition. voigt [4]called for contributions to the
   November 2009 issue of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report.
   See post for details.

   Call for Participation: VSTTE 2009. Jean-Christophe Filliatre
   [5]announced a call for participation for the VSTTE Workshop.

   WFLP 2010 Call for papers. Pablo Nogueira [6]announced a call for
   papers for the 2010 WFLP.

   BAHUG Next meeting: October 21st at MIT (32G-882). Ravi Nanavati
   [7]announced the next meeting of the Boston Area Haskell User's Group.
   Which will be in the CSAIL Reading Room at MIT. This editor hopes to
   actually make it to this one, so maybe I'll see you there!

   fp-southwales, the South Wales Functional Programming User Group. Andy
   Gimblett [8]announced the formation of fp-southwales, a user group for
   anybody interested in functional programming in the area of south
   Wales, UK.

   The Monad.Reader (14) - Call for copy. Brent Yorgey [9]announced the
   call for copy for the next issue of `The Monad.Reader`, Issue #14

   Extensions to Vec uploaded (useful for GPipe programs). Tobias Bexelius
   [10]announced two extensions to the Vec package: Vec-Transform and
   Vec-Boolean. Vec-Transform provides some 4x4 transform matrices such as
   perspective projection and rotation. Vec-Boolean provides Data.Boolan
   instances for the Vec data types.

   Bindings to FFMpeg library. Vasyl Pasternak [11]announced the next
   release of the hs-ffmpeg library. Downloadable from Hackage along with
   the ffmpeg-tutorials, which show capabilities of this library. The
   installation process is a bit tricky so Vasyl put up a [12]blog post
   which describes the installation process.

   Haskell Hackathon in Zurich, Switzerland. Johan Tibell [13]announced a
   Hackathon in Zurich, to be held in March in the Google office. No
   concrete date has been decided, but if your interested, make sure to
   add your name [14]here.

   Reverse Dependencies in Hackage (demo). Roel van Dijk [15]announced his
   patch to add reverse-dependencies to Hackage, see the linked post for
   information on where to see an example version of hackage.

Discussion

   Relational Algebra. Guenther Schmidt [16]asked about whether or not a
   EDSL for relational algebra in Haskell.

   GHC devs. Andrew Coppin [17]asked about how many GHC Developers there
   are, and was somewhat surprised with the answer.

   Fuzzy Logic / Linguistic Variables. Neal Alexander [18]demonstrated an
   implementation of fuzzy logic taken from the book: 'Programming Game AI
   by Example' by Mat Buckland. In the book, the code was in C++,
   rewriting it in Haskell made for much more succint, readable code.

   Graph Library Using Associated Types. Lajos Nagy [19]asked about using
   Associated types in a Graph library.

   Is proof by testing possible? Muad'Dib [20]asked us Haskell Mentat's
   about whether it was possible to prove a function correct in a finite
   number of tests. The discussion brought forth not only answers but some
   /very cool/ results about the application of compactness (in the
   topological sense) to testing.

Blog noise

   [21]Haskell news from the [22]blogosphere. Blog posts from people new
   to the Haskell community are marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them!
     * Don Stewart (dons): [23]LACSS 2009: Domain Specific Languages and
       Haskell.
     * FP Lunch: [24]Factorising folds for faster functions.
     * Mikael Vejdemo Johansson (Syzygy-): [25][MATH 198] Lecture 4 and a
       question for the community. More of Syzygy's lectures on category
       theory, Syzygy also asks about what it means to 'integrate' a
       datatype.
     * Neil Brown: [26]Emulating Shared Mutable Variables with
       Message-Passing Processes.
     * Galois, Inc: [27]Tech Talk: Writing Linux Kernel Modules with
       Haskell.
     * Galois, Inc: [28]Domain Specific Languages for Domain Specific
       Problems.
     * FP-Syd: [29]Sydney FP Group: FP-Syd #18..
     * Neil Brown: [30]The octopus, the boids and GHC 6.12.1rc1.
     * Brent Yorgey: [31]Call for submissions: Monad.Reader issue 15.
     * Brent Yorgey: [32]diagrams 0.2.1, and future plans.
     * Don Stewart (dons): [33]Self-optimizing data structures: using
       types to make lists faster.
     * Martijn van Steenbergen: [34]Context Synonyms.
     * Joachim Breitner: [35]arbtt: Now with Documentation.
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [36]Vectors, Invariance, and Math APIs.
     * Creighton Hogg: [37]How to teach Category Theory?.

Quotes of the Week

     * sproingie: How do you beta-reduce a problem like Maria
     * Baughn: There's also the language, Quine, whose interpreter is
       implemented as a symlink to /bin/cat
     * benmachine: [on the best editor] opinions vary. from correct
       opinions i.e. mine to other ones. [editor's comment: Obviously,
       this question is settled, the best editor is *garbled*]
     * pozic: statistics. a wonderful tool to control people.
     * FunctorSalad: I think the 'asks', 'gets' etc family of names is
       sort of cute, like the program is talking about itself in the third
       person
     * mmorrow:: Right, that's just beggin for a State monad.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [38]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [39]the Haskell Sequence and [40]Planet Haskell. [41]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [42]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [43]how to contribute. Send stories to jfredett . at .
   gmail . dot . com. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [44]http://patch-tag.com/r/jfredett/HWN2/pullrepo HWN2 .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://www.reddit.com/r/EnHaskell
   3. http://www.reddit.com/r/EnHaskell/comments/9syi3/calculating_the_bend_for_a_curtain_rail_for_a_bay/
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17572
   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17570
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64933
   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64928
   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64858
   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64717
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64673
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64901
  12. http://progandprog.blogspot.com/2009/10/video-processing-on-haskell-easy.html
  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64947
  14. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/ZuriHac#Possible_Attendees
  15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64915
  16. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64899
  17. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64867
  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64860
  19. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64812
  20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/64757
  21. http://planet.haskell.org/
  22. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  23. http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/lacss-2009-domain-specific-languages-and-haskell/
  24. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=267
  25. http://blog.mikael.johanssons.org/archive/2009/10/math-198-lecture-4-and-a-question-for-the-community/
  26. http://chplib.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/emulating-shared-mutable-variables-with-message-passing-processes/
  27. http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/10/13/haskellkernelmodules/
  28. http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/10/13/domain-specific-languages-for-domain-specific-problems/
  29. http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/FP-Syd/fp-syd-18.html
  30. http://chplib.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/the-octopus-the-boids-and-ghc-6-12-1rc1/
  31. http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/call-for-submissions-monad-reader-issue-15/
  32. http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/diagrams-0-2-1-and-future-plans/
  33. http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/self-optimizing-data-structures-using-types-to-make-lists-faster/
  34. http://martijn.van.steenbergen.nl/journal/2009/10/11/context-synonyms/
  35. https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/archives/342-arbtt-Now-with-Documentation.html
  36. http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/10/vectors-invariance-and-math-apis.html
  37. http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-to-teach-category-theory.html
  38. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  39. http://sequence.complete.org/
  40. http://planet.haskell.org/
  41. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  42. http://haskell.org/
  43. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  44. http://patch-tag.com/r/jfredett/HWN2/pullrepo%20HWN2


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