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Haskell Weekly News: June 13, 2009

Posted 6 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: June 13, 2009
Welcome to issue 121 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements purely functional lazy ... [More] non-deterministic
programming. Sebastian Fischer
announced
the explicit-sharing
library, which supports lazy functional-logic programming in Haskell.

nntp 0.0.1. Maciej Piechotka
announced
the release of nntp,
a library to connect to nntp (i.e. mainly USENET) servers.

OpenGLRaw 1.0.0.0. Sven Panne
announced
the release of OpenGLRaw,
a low-level binding for OpenGL. The eventual goal is to make the OpenGL
package easier to install, more modular and a bit more flexible.

pgm-0.1 on Hackage. Frederick Ross
announced
pgm,
a pure Haskell library to read and write PGM images. It seamlessly handles
the divide between 1 and 2 byte per pixel images; reads and writes UArrays;
can handle multiple PGMs concatenated one after another in a file; and
encodes and decodes all comments in the PGM header, which can be used to
drop arbitrary metadata into files in a human readable manner.

iteratee-0.2.1 released. John Lato
announced
the release of iteratee-0.2.1,
a major update to the iteratee library. This library provides types
and functions for performing enumerator/iteratee based I/O operations in
Haskell, as described
by Oleg. The new version is a large redesign, including support for
resumable exceptions and a greatly simplified interface.

testrunner-0.9. Reinier Lamers announced
testrunner, a new
framework for running unit tests. It can run unit tests in parallel;
can run QuickCheck and HUnit tests as well as simple boolean expressions;
and comes with a ready-made main function for your unit test executable.

serial-0.2. Frederick Ross
announced
version 0.2 of serial,
a library for working with line-oriented POSIX serial ports.

hunp-0.0. Deniz Dogan
announced
hunp, a command-line
utility which automagically calls the right "unpacker" program for you
and works on both files and directories.

Nemesis : easy task management. Jinjing Wang
announced
a new release of nemesis,
a simple rake-like task management tool.

Data.Reify.CSE. Sebastiaan Visser
announced
the data-reify-cse
module, which implements common sub-expression elimination for graphs
generated by the Data.Reify package. This package might especially be
useful for optimizing simple compilers for referentially transparent
domain specific languages.

Hac phi accommodation: register by June 15 for reduced rate!
Brent Yorgey
reminded
anyone interested in attending Hac phi that Monday
15 June is the deadline for getting a special reduced hotel rate.

alloy-1.0.0 (generic programming). Neil Brown
announced
the first
release of the Allow generic
programming library. It is intended to be a fairly fast blend of several
other generics approaches, such as SYB (but without the dynamic typing)
and Uniplate (but allowing an arbitrary number of target types), for
performing transformations on specific types in large tree structures.

StrictBench 0.1 - Benchmarking code through strict
evaluation. R.A. Niemeijer
announced
the release of StrictBench,
a library for timing full evaluation of values.

haskeem 0.7.0 uploaded to hackage. Uwe Hollerbach
announced
haskeem,
a small scheme interpreter written in Haskell.

numtype 1.0 -- Type-level (low cardinality) integers. Bjorn
Buckwalter
announced
the Numeric.NumType
module, now released as its own package, which implements a unary
type-level representation of integers, supporting addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division.

Google Summer of Code Progress
updates from participants in the 2008 Google
Summer of Code.

space profiling. Gergely Patai
has some pretty
graphs generated by his profiling library.

haskell-src-exts. Niklas Broberg
is quite
close to releasing haskell-src-exts 1.0.0, as soon
as he has full and correct support for (almost) everything
code-related, with only a few things left to do. He also wrote
a
post explaining the intricacies of parsing code containing the 'forall'
keyword (well, whether it is a keyword depends on which extensions are
enabled...)

fast darcs. Petr Rockai
made a bit less progress this week, with
finals and other things interfering, but made some
progress on some documentation, tracking down a performance regression,
and other things.

Discussion Adding an ignore function to
Control.Monad. Gwern Branwen
proposed
adding an 'ignore' function to Control.Monad which explicitly changes an
m a into a m (). Bikeshedding (and some useful discussion) ensued.

Wiki user accounts. Philippa Cowderoy
began a discussion
of what to do about the current situation with wiki user accounts (namely,
that account creation is disabled due to spam, and the one maintainer of
the wiki can't always respond to account creation requests instantly).

Lightweight type-level dependent programming in Haskell. Ryan
Ingram
made an interesting post
about implementing lightweight closed type classes in Haskell.

who's up for a hackathon? (ICFP, late Aug, early Sept). Eric Kow
wanted
to know who would be interested in having a hackathon immediately
before or after ICFP in Edinburgh.

Jobs Galois is hiring functional programmers. Don Stewart
announced
that Galois is hiring! See the
announcement for more details.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them! Niklas Broberg: GSoC
status report, week 3.

Joachim Breitner: Introducing
L-seed.

Conal Elliott: Memoizing
polymorphic functions - part
two.

London Haskell Users Group: Next
Meeting: Sean Leather, Fun and generic things to
do with EMGM.

David Amos: It's
on Hackage!. Haskell for Maths is now just
a cabal-install away.

Michael Snoyman: Filename
encoding issues.

David Amos: Permutation
groups.

Edward Kmett: Recursion
Schemes: A Field Guide (Redux).

mightybyte: Intro
to HAppS-State.

Conal Elliott: Memoizing
polymorphic functions - part
one.

Lennart Augustsson: More
LLVM.

Roman Cheplyaka: Don't
play with your monads.

Galois, Inc: Tech
Talk: Orc in Haskell.

Petr Rockai: soc progress
3. Progress on Petr's GSoC darcs project.

Magnus
Therning: Using
msmtp with darcs.

Erik de Castro Lopo: Debian
Maintainer. Erik is now a Debian
maintainer, and plans to give Haskell on Debian a
much-needed facelift!

Niklas Broberg: What's
in a forall?. More Haskell
parsing fun.

Well-Typed.Com: GHC,
primops and exorcising GMP.

Niklas Broberg: What's
in a forall?. More than
you might expect!

>>> Zsol: Visualizing
the graphrewrite process behind Haskell. Work on the visual-graphrewrite
package.

Eric Kow (kowey): testrunner
for practical quickcheck.

Sebastian Fischer: Explicit
sharing of monadic effects. Purely functional, lazy,
non-deterministic programming!

LHC Team: New
backend.

>>> James McNeill: Messing
with Haskell.

Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Hashing
Molecules.

Shin-Cheng Mu: Longest
Segment Satisfying Suffix and Overlap-Closed
Predicates.

David Amos: Simple
graphs with Math.Combinatorics.Graph. David shows off
his Haskell for Maths library.

Gergely Patai: More
colourful graphs. Graphs from Gergely's GSoC
project on profiling.

Bryan O'Sullivan: Case
conversion and text 0.3. The text module gets solid,
standards-compliant case conversion.

Bjorn Buckwalter: numtype
1.0: Type-level (low cardinality) integers.

>>>
Jörn Dinkla: Parallelization
with Haskell - Easy as can be.

Quotes of the Week sjanssen: in our sub-culture,
"considered harmful" means "burn it with fire"
quicksilver: after all, anyone who insists on talking
about himself in the third person is clearly someone to be reckoned
with.
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

[Less]

Haskell Weekly News: June 6, 2009

Posted 6 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: June 06, 2009
Welcome to issue 120 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Sorry for the massive HWN, I missed last ... [More] week so
you're getting two for the price of one! Registration for Hac phi is now open, be
sure to register soon (register by June 15 to get a special hotel rate).

Announcements Reminder: Haskell Implementers' Workshop CFT
deadline in 2 weeks. Simon Marlow
reminded
everyone to consider submitting a talk proposal for the Haskell
Implementers' Workshop, to be held in conjunction with ICFP in Edinburgh,
Scotland on 5 September. The deadline for submissions is a couple of
weeks away (15 June); all that is needed is an abstract.

storable-record. Henning Thielemann
announced
storable-record,
a small package for simplified declaration of Storable
instances for records. It may be used as an alternative to the
c2hs
preprocessor. It was made possible by advanced applicative technology,
a cutting edge LCM monoid and an incredible constructor power tower.

Haskell Communities and Activities Report (16th ed., May
2009). Janis Voigtlaender
announced
the availability of the 16th
Haskell Communities and Activities Report.

hledger 0.5 released. Simon Michael
announced
the release of version 0.5 of hledger,
a (mostly) text-mode double-entry accounting tool that generates precise
activity and balance reports from a plain text journal file.

New repository and trac for haskell-src-exts. Niklas Broberg
announced
some new infrastructure for the haskell-src-exts package,
set up in preparation for his GSoC project. with the
HSP packages, it's now old enough to be allowed to live on its own. There
is also a bug
tracker. Please help by reporting any bugs you come across, or by
requesting new and cool features.

bsd-sysctl 1.0.3. Maxime Henrion
announced
the release of bsd-sysctl
1.0.3, a package that provides a System.BSD.Sysctl module allowing
access to the C sysctl(3) API. It should fully work on FreeBSD, NetBSD
and Mac OS X platforms.

multirec-binary. Sebastiaan Visser
announced
the release of multirec-binary,
which allows generic derivation of Data.Binary instances using the MultiRec
library.

notice for package authors. Duncan Coutts
announced
that Hackage uploads will soon require an upper bound on the version of
the base package and reject packages that omit it. This will hopefully
result in less breakage the next time a new version of the base package
is released.

(Pre-) Announce: Data.GDS 0.1.0. Uwe Hollerbach
(pre-)
announced Data.GDS, a small module to write and (eventually) read
GDS files, a classic format of the semiconductor industry. The module
can currently generate GDS files with a fairly low-level interface;
planned future versions (which will be uploaded to Hackage) will have a
higher-level interface and be able to parse GDS files as well.

new version of uu-parsinglib. S. Doaitse Swierstra
announced
that a new version of the uu-parsinglib
library has been uploaded to hackage. It is now based on Control.Applicative
where possible. Be warned that functions like some and many will be
redefined in the future.

Hac phi: Haskell hackathon in Philadelphia, July 24-26. Brent
Yorgey
announced
Hac phi, a Haskell hackathon/get-together to be held July 24-26 at the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The hackathon will officially
kick off at 2:30 Friday afternoon, and go until 5pm on Sunday (with
breaks for sleep, of course). Everyone is welcome---you do not have to be
a Haskell guru to attend! Helping hack on someone else's project could be
a great way to increase your Haskell-fu. If you plan on coming, please register.
There is a block of hotel rooms available at a special rate only
until June 15, so register early! More details can be found on the Hac phi wiki.

Job for someone: make a VM image for GHC development. Simon Marlow
suggested
a useful project for someone looking for something to do: create a VM
image of a Linux system with a complete GHC development environment set
up and ready to go.

My attempt at Haskell USB. Mauricio
announced
some Haskell
bindings to libusb, and gave another plug for his bindings-common
package, which makes it easier to generate Haskell bindings to low-level
libraries.

second alpha release of OSX haskell platform installer. Gregory
Collins
announced
a second
candidate release for the OSX Haskell Platform installer. Please try
it out!

Release Schedule for 2009.2.0.2. Don Stewart
announced
the release
schedule for the next minor release of the 2009.2.0 branch of the
Haskell Platform. The freeze for package changes will be Wednesday 1 July,
and the release is scheduled for Monday 13th July.

hscamwire, for IIDC1394 cameras. Frederick Ross
announced
the release of hscamwire
0.1, which provides a nice Haskellized layer over Camwire, a library
to connect to IIDC1394 cameras (most scientific and industrial Firewire
cameras) on Linux.

Safe and generic printf with C-like format string. oleg
announced
some code to implement a type-safe polyvariadic version of printf, which
is also integrated with Show so that any showable type can be printed.

A library for serial ports. Frederick Ross
announced
the release of serial-0.1,
a library for line-oriented interaction with serial ports on POSIX
compatible systems.

HaL4: Haskell-Meeting in Germany, 12th June 2009. Janis
Voigtlaender
reminded
everyone of Hal4, a German-language
Haskell gathering to be held in Halle/Saale on June 12. There are already
close to 50 registered participants, so expect a very lively meeting! Late
registration still possible.

wp-archivebot 0.1 - archive Wikipedia's external links in
WebCite. Gwern Branwen
announced
wp-archivebot,
a relatively simple little script which follows all the links in a RSS
feed, combs the destination for http:// links, and submits them to WebCite.

memscript-0.0.0.2. Ki Yung Ahn
announced
memscript,
a command line utility for memorizing scriptures or any other text.

HSH 2.0.0. John Goerzen
announced
the release of version
2.0.0 of HSH, the Haskell shell scripting library. This version features
a complete rewrite of the core using System.Process, a drastic reduction
in code size and complexity, cross-platform support, and a simpler and
more flexible API.

atom-0.0.5. Tom Hawkins
announced
version 0.5 of the atom
library, a DSL for embedded hard realtime applications. This version
includes a few bug fixes and doc improvements.

heap-1.0.0. Stephan Friedrichs
announced
a rewrite of the heap package, heap-1.0.0.
It is not 100% compatible with version 0.6.0, but provides major
improvements, including a better mechanism for instantiating min-,
max-, min-prio- and max-prio-heaps, and faster {from,to}{Asc,Desc}List
conversions.

The Haskell Platform 2009.2.0.1. Don Stewart
announced
the second release (2009.2.0.1) of the Haskell Platform, a
single, standard Haskell distribution for everyone. The specification,
along with installers (including Windows and Unix installers for a full
Haskell environment) are available.

Anglohaskell 2009. Philippa Cowderoy
announced
Anglohaskell
2009, to be held at MSR Cambridge on the 7th and 8th of August.

code reviewers wanted for hashed-storage (darcs). Eric Kow
solicited
anyone with a few spare hours this summer willing to help the Darcs project
as a code reviewer for the standalone hashed-storage module, which will
be used by Darcs in the future. No Darcs experience is needed!

Google Summer of Code Progress
updates from participants in the 2008 Google
Summer of Code.

Haddock improvements. Isaac Dupree
has begun looking at the Haddock code, and has a question
about which of two options he should pursue.

EclipseFP. Thomas Ten Cate
has posted an explanation
of how the Scion client/server model works.

Space profiling. Gergely Patai
has uploaded
a preliminary version of the hp2any core library which
handles heap profiles both during and after execution. He has also posted
some pretty graphs generated by a simple utility built on top of the
core library.

haskell-src-exts. Niklas Broberg
has begun work by making a list
of all language extensions and the ways in which they affect lexing
and parsing, since haskell-src-exts will need to be parameterized over
these extensions.

Fast Darcs. Petr Rockai
has posted two detailed progress reports
already, with many changes to both the standalone hashed-storage library
and a fork of darcs
which uses it.

Discussion Error message reform (was: Strange type error
with associated type synonyms). Max Rabkin
began an interesting discussion
about error messages. Do you have an intuitive sense of which is the
'expected' and which the 'inferred' type?

time library dependencies. Ashley Yakeley
asked
what dependencies are acceptable for the time library, leading to a
discussion of what dependencies are acceptable for base packages.

Bool as type class to serve EDSLs. Sebastiaan Visser
started a discussion
on the possibility of a type class for representing Boolean values,
much like the current Num class for numeric values.

Jobs 10 jobs in declarative programming. Oege de Moor
announced
the availability of positions with Semmle and LogicBlox for ten declarative
programming consultants, who will work with clients to write custom queries
in Datalog, and to create user interfaces in a declarative framework. Semmle
and LogicBlox are creating a platform for declarative programming in
Datalog, a pure logic programming language. Semmle is based in Oxford,
headed by Oege de Moor; LogicBlox is based in Atlanta, headed by Molham
Aref. See the announcement for more information and how to apply.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are
marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them! David Amos: Welcome
to Haskell for Maths. David's Haskell library for mathematics
exploration is under development again!

Joachim Breitner: Third
place in AI programming
contest.

Bryan O'Sullivan: Dealing
with encoding errors in
Data.Text.

Remco Niemeijer: Programming
Praxis - Ternary Search Tries.

beelsebob: Collecting
Non-Memory Resources.

Luke Palmer: It
is never safe to cheat. Ceiling cat
is watching you.

Alex McLean: More hackery. More
cool livecoding with Haskell.

Thomas ten Cate: Client/server
communication.

Gergely Patai: The
first graphs.

Alson Kemp: Turbinado
V0.6.5.

Don Stewart (dons): The
Haskell Platform 2009.2.0.1. The first minor update release
of the Haskell Platform is here.

Alson Kemp: Turbinado
V0.6.5.

Michael Snoyman: Functors
and Monads (containers).

Well-Typed.Com: Come
talk at the Haskell Implementers'
Workshop!.

GSoC Fast Darcs: soc
progress 2.

Shin-Cheng Mu: On
a Basic Property for the Longest Prefix
Problem.

>>> Ben Hutchison: OO/Imperative
programmers: 'Study Functional Programming or Be
Ignorant'.

Michael Snoyman: Run
a MonadCGI as a CGI
application!.

Michael Snoyman: Wordify:
RESTful Haskell web apps.

Marco Tulio Gontijo e
Silva: xmlGetWidget
without castTo*.

>>> slawekk: Probability
monad.

Brandon Simmons: Huffman
Coding.

Niklas Broberg: Parametrising
haskell-src-exts on extensions. A list of language extensions
and how they affect parsing.

Manuel M T Chakravarty: Instant Generics now
has a website!.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: The
CAS experiment.

Brent Yorgey: Hac
phi!. Registration is now open.

Jeff Heard: Buster
2.2 - Application Orchestration redux. Example
code showing off Buster.

Bryan O'Sullivan: I
put a pidgit in your widget so you can fidget
while you calculate pi. GHC and the
language shootout.

Niklas Broberg: Haskell
Platform, I'm in love.

Bjorn Buckwalter: Benchmarking
Amazon EC2 with GHC.

Bjorn Buckwalter: Blogging
with Pandoc, literate Haskell, and a
bug.

>>> Chris Moos: Haskell
AIM Client - a cool proof of concept.

Marco Tulio Gontijo e Silva: Generating code with
Haskell-src and TH.

Quotes of the Week pumpkin: we should throw it
[CReal] in with Foreign.C.Types to confuse people
MyCatVerbs: The *real* best way to optimize a
program is to tell dons that it's been added to the Shootout.
SimonFrankau: The points-free approach, while elegant,
can make code unreadable, especially if it is written by quantitative
analysts moonlighting as functional programmers. ValarQ:
l33t_h4x0r: could you help me port GHC to the AVR architecture? <--
l33t_h4x0r has left #haskell gwern: drat. what *do*
all you people talk about? only one bacon and one zombie quote
quicksilver: well if you can get proggit to help with your
interview, then perhaps you can get proggit to help with the job when
you get it. So it's not cheating, it's just an indication of one of your
skill sets. shapr: I haven't tried F#, everytime I
get the urge to do something fun with .NET I have SharePoint flashbacks
and buy more hardware instead. gwern: bleh. haskell
is messing me up. I wondered what operator =) is, before I realized it
was a syntax error, before I realized it was an emoticon
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

[Less]

Haskell Weekly News: May 23, 2009

Posted 7 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: May 23, 2009
Welcome to issue 119 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements GHC porting works again. Ian ... [More] Lynagh
announced
that the instructions
for porting GHC to a new architecture now work again with the HEAD. If
you get stuck when trying to do a port, feel free to ask on cvs-ghc at
haskell.org or in #ghc on freenode.

6.10.4 plans. Ian Lynagh
announced
plans for a 6.10.4 bugfix release of GHC. If you know of any bugs that
you think should be looked into for 6.10.4, please let the development
team know.

The Timber compiler 1.0.3. Johan Nordlander
announced
the release of version 1.0.3 of the Timber compiler. Timber is a modern
language for building event-driven systems, based around the notion of
reactive objects. It is also a purely functional language derived from
Haskell, although with a strict evaluation semantics. 1.0.3 is a bug fix
release, paving the way for future feature releases.

mathlink-2.0.0.3. Tracy Wadleigh
announced
the release of mathlink,
a library for writing Mathematica packages in Haskell. One simply writes
some functions of type (MLGet a, MLPut b) => a -> IO b and provides
a package specification in a simple DSL; the result is a program that
exposes functions that can be called from Mathematica.

text 0.2, fast and comprehensive Unicode support using stream
fusion. Bryan O'Sullivan
announced
the availability of text
0.2, an efficient Unicode text library that uses stream fusion. New
and notable in this release is support for lazy, chunked text, so you
can process text files far larger than memory using a small footprint.

Haskell Hackathon in Philadelphia. Brent Yorgey
announced
Hac phi, a Haskell hackathon to be held in Philadelphia in July. Check out
the wiki page
and add your name if you are interested in attending! More details to
follow soon.

feed2twitter 0.2 & hackage2twitter 0.2.1. Tom Lokhorst
announced
the first release of feed2twitter,
a library for sending posts from a news feed to Twitter.

EsotericBot 0.0.1. spoon
announced
the release of Esotericbot,
a sophisticated, lightweight IRC bot, written in Haskell.

atom 0.0.4. Tom Hawkins
announced
a new release of atom;
this version adds an array datatype (A a).

Hieroglyph-2.21 and buster, buster-gtk, and
buster-network-2.0. Jeff Heard
announced
new releases of Hieroglyph,
buster,
buster-gtk,
and buster-network,
with tons of changes; read Jeff's original announcement for details.

TxtSushi 0.1. Keith Sheppard
announced
the first version of TxtSushi, a collection
of command line utilities for processing tab-delimited and CSV files. It
includes a utility for doing SQL SELECTs on flat files.

Discussion Should exhaustiveness testing be on by default?
Don Stewart
started a discussion,
prompted by a recent
blog post, on whether coverage checking should be on by default,
and other issues relating to compiler warnings and coding style.

Proposal on the platform API policy question. Duncan Coutts
proposed
a general policy for Haskell Platform release cycles and versioning,
based on input from previous discussions.

the problem of design by negation. Michael Mossey
began a discussion
on software design philosophies. "Design by negation" considered
harmful?

Haskell in 3 Slides. John Van Enk
asked
for ideas on a 3 to 4 slide introduction to Haskell. What do YOU
think should be on those slides?

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them! Bryan O'Sullivan: Streaming
Unicode support for Haskell: text 0.2.

Alex McLean: Haskell
hack. Music generation
in Haskell.

Well-Typed.Com: Building
plugins as Haskell shared libs. A sneak preview of building
Haskell shared libraries on Linux.

LHC Team: New
release: LHC 0.8.

Mark Wassell: Grapefruit
And Glade.

Conal Elliott: The
C language is purely
functional.

>>> Will Donnelly: Haskell:
A Pretty Nice Language.

FP-Syd: Sydney
FP Group: FP-Syd #14..

Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Trace
Diagrams with Monads.

Quotes of the Week roconnor: Damn it, I don't know
how to make this as slow as python.
koeien: Let's register it [monomorphismrestriction.com] to
prevent it from being used ;) Elly: Rule 1 of malloc is
the same as rule 1 of air travel: "Attempt at all costs to keep your number
of landings equal to your number of takeoffs." monochrom:
I was trying to design a sensible language... then I downloaded ghc.
conal: The C ADT is implemented simply as String (or char *,
for you type theorists, using a notation from Kleene) Will
Donnelly: monads are okay after a bit (though I'm still a little
suspicious of them)
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

[Less]

Haskell Weekly News: May 16, 2009

Posted 7 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: May 16, 2009
Welcome to issue 118 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Welcome to the Google Summer of Code ... [More] special edition! I asked each
of the five students with accepted GSoC projects to describe what they plan
to work on. You'll find their descriptions below, with links to their blogs.
And keep watching this space: as I did last summer, I plan to provide readers
of the HWN with weekly updates on the progress of the GSoC projects.

Google Summer of Code Haddock improvements! Isaac Dupree
is working on improvements
to Haddock. "Besides the
various inevitable small fixes/improvements, my specific projects are to
make cross-package documentation work, and to refactor the comment-parsing
out of GHC and into the Haddock code-base."

EclipseFP. Thomas Ten Cate
will be working on EclipseFP:
"Compared to more mainstream languages, Haskell has surprisingly poor IDE
support, even though its static typing system allows for much more help
from the IDE than in the case of dynamic languages. For the Java language,
a very mature and powerful IDE exists in the form of Eclipse. A plugin
for Haskell support in Eclipse, called EclipseFP, is in the works, but its
development has been standing still for some time. I will bring EclipseFP
to a more usable state. For this, I will use the Scion IDE library, which
interfaces with the GHC API, so that more advanced features like type
inference become possible. I will also add support for Cabal. Hopefully,
this type of IDE support will lead to greater acceptance and use of Haskell,
and be useful for development as well as education."

Improving the Haskell space profiling experience.
Gergely Patai's project
will be focused on space profiling: "At the present moment, heap profiling
Haskell programs means analysing logs off-line, using conversion tools
to visualise data. However, instead of generating graphs with hp2ps,
it should be possible to present the data in a graphical application in
real time, which is useful while developing interactive applications,
and it should also be made easier to export profiler output in different
formats. The aim of the project is to create a set of tools that make
heap profiling of Haskell programs easier in various ways. In particular,
the following components are planned: a library to process profiler output
in an efficient way and make it easily accessible for other tools in the
future; a real-time visualiser (most likely using OpenGL); some kind of
history manager to keep track of profiling data and make it possible to
perform a comparative analysis of performance between different versions
of your program; a maintainable and extensible replacement for hp2ps;
and converters to provide input for other profiling tools."

haskell-src-exts -> haskell-src.
Niklas Broberg: "My project,
dubbed 'haskell-src-exts -> haskell-src' is really two projects in one
wrapping. The first milestone is to bring my haskell-src-exts library
to the point where it can supersede the old haskell-src library as
the de facto package for haskell source manipulation. The main problem
that I need to solve is to implement a scheme that lets the user decide
what extensions to recognize when parsing a source document. Currently,
haskell-src-exts assumes all extensions are always on, which means that
some valid H98 programs will be incorrectly parsed due to stolen syntax
by e.g. Template Haskell. The second milestone is to extend the focus from
source code to full source documents, and implement a scheme for handling
comments as well. The ultimate goal here is to have (pretty . parse) == id,
to allow haskell-src-exts to be run on source documents without changing
them. This would open up for some really interesting applications, in
particular refactoring tools that could automatically apply transformations
to a source document while still preserving comments."

darcs.
Last but not least, Petr Rockai will be working on improvements
to darcs: "My project revolves around the
idea of fast darcs for medium and large repositories. Three are quite
a few haskellers who use darcs in their day to day (haskell) work. A
fair number of hackage packages is maintained in darcs. Even though
many of these repositories are of a relatively modest size, there is a
number of relatively large real-world darcs repositories out there. The
primary target of the project is to improve scalability of darcs for
large working trees. This should help those users with existing large
darcs repositories, as well as encourage people to use darcs for larger
projects, whenever the development model fits. I intend to make the darcs
working tree handling comparably fast to git. And then, git is written
in C, hand-tuned for a specific operating system. And unlike mercurial,
I do not plan to introduce a C library for low level routines. So let's
prove that Haskell is up to the challenge."

Announcements 2009.2.1: version freeze for Haskell Platform
approaching on Monday. Don Stewart
announced
that the last chance to propose bug fix version bumps to
be included in the first minor release (2009.2.1) of the Haskell Platform
is Monday. Please ensure that, as maintainer for one of the 2009.2.x
series of packages, any bug fixes are in place by Monday, or they'll be
bumped to the next platform release.

OpenGL 2.2.3.0. Sven Panne
announced
the release of a new version of the OpenGL
package. This is a feature release, containing a number of changes
and additions.

Programming in Haskell -- solutions to exercises. Graham Hutton
announced
that solutions to the exercises from "Programming in Haskell" are now available online.

Bookshelf. Emil Axelsson
announced
the first release of Bookshelf,
a simple document organizer with some wiki functionality. Documents in a
directory tree are displayed as a set of HTML pages. Documents in Markdown
format are converted to HTML automatically using Pandoc.

Request for feedback: HaskellDB + HList. Brian Bloniarz
requested
feedback on a branch of HaskellDB which replaces
the home-grown Record code with HList records.

RESTng 0.1 + RedHandlers 0.1 (request handlers) + YuiGrids 0.1 (yahoo
grids). Sergio Urinovsky
announced
the release of three new packages developed
for a RESTful web framework called RESTng: RESTng,
redHandlers,
and yuiGrid.

#haskell.pt IRC channel. Marco Túlio Gontijo e Silva
announced
the formation of the #haskell.pt channel on irc.freenode.net for
Portuguese-speaking Haskellers.

Fun with type functions. Simon Peyton-Jones
requested
feedback on a draft
tutorial paper about type families (aka associated data types, or
type functions).

Discussion conflicting variable definitions in
pattern. Martin Hofmann
asked
about the possibility of repeated variables in patterns, resulting in an
interesting discussion.

Removing mtl from the Haskell Platform. Russell O'Connor
began a discussion
around the possibility of removing the mtl package from the Haskell
Platform, and replacing it with something more modern.

Jobs PhD position in Nottingham. vxc
announced
the availability of a new PhD position in the Functional Programming
Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. The topic of research for
the project is "Programming and Reasoning with Infinite Structures":
it consists in the theoretical study and development of software tools
for coinductive types and structured corecursion.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them! Leif Frenzel: EclipseFP
is going to be reloaded.

Tom Schrijvers: Dictionaries:
Eager or Lazy Type Class Witnesses?. Can
type class dictionaries be optimized by treating
them strictly?

Real-World Haskell: RWH
Now In The Kindle Store.

JP Moresmau: Adding
a Writer Monad transformer.

Ketil Malde: Using
a phantom type to label different kinds of
sequences.

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic: Functions
All The Way Down. Ivan's talk on
lambda calculus.

Thomas M. DuBuisson: Fun
with Distributed Hash Tables. Distributed
hash tables in Haskell.

Darcs: darcs
joins the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Mark
Wassell: Just
Grapefruit. Mark's first impressions of
the Grapefruit library.

Roman Cheplyaka: LambdaCube
accepted to JSSP. Jane Street is funding development of
the LambdaCube 3D rendering engine.

>>> Joel Neely: BuilderBuilder:
The Model in Haskell.

Brandon Simmons: directory-tree
module released.

>>> Sadek Drobi: Paul
Hudak on Haskell. An interview
with Paul Hudak.

>>> dayvan cowboy: Blast
from the past: a stochastic monad in
Haskell.

Matthew Podwysocki: Type
Classes Are The Secret Sauce
.

Remco Niemeijer: Programming
Praxis - Priority Queues. A priority queue
implementation using a leftist heap.

>>> Y. Liang: A
Lambda Calculus Interpreter in Haskell.

Quotes of the Week seydar: what's the nick of
the drug addict who wrote learn you a haskell? and i mean that in the best
possible way.
roconnor: String is kinda a poor data type for strings.
kyevan: I had a haskell-related dream last night. Sorta. I
was beaten up by some kids because I tried to go somewhere my type didn't
match, apparently. edwardk: Haskell 98 is the Windows
98 of standards ;) PhilipWadler: I'm delighted to
learn that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors"---anyone
know where I can find a good tutorial? David Leimbach:
Don't play with your monads... eventually you'll go bind.
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

[Less]

Haskell Weekly News: May 12, 2009

Posted 7 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: May 12, 2009
Welcome to issue 117 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

The Haskell Platform is ... [More] here!

Announcements The
Haskell Platform. Don Stewart
announced
the first release of the Haskell Platform: a single,
standard Haskell distribution for every system. The Haskell Platform is a
blessed library and tool suite for Haskell culled from Hackage, along with
installers for a wide variety of systems. It saves developers work picking
and choosing the best Haskell libraries and tools to use for a task.

GHC version 6.10.3. Ian Lynagh
announced
the release of GHC 6.10.3. This
release contains a handful of bugfixes relative to 6.10.2 and better
line editing support in GHCi, so updating is recommend. See the release
notes for more details.

Bindings for libguestfs. Richard W.M. Jones
announced
some partial
bindings for libguestfs.

Heads up: Conflicting versions of network-2.2.1. Johan Tibell
announced
a heads-up that the version of network-2.2.1 that shipped with GHC 6.10
differs from the one on Hackage. If you want the API additions that
are present in network-2.2.1 on Hackage, be sure to use network-2.2.1.1
instead.

hpc-strobe-0.1: Hpc-generated strobes for a running Haskell
program. Thorkil Naur
announced
the initial release of hpc-strobe,
a rudimentary library that demonstrates the possibility of using Hpc
(Haskell Program Coverage) to inspect the state of a running Haskell
program. hpc-strobe uses the basic machinery provided by Hpc to produce
multiple tix files, also called strobes, representing the coverage
at different times while the program is running. By subtracting such
two tix files, again using Hpc machinery, a tix file representing the
expressions used between the times of recording the subtracted tix files
is produced. This may be used, for example, to get a better idea of what
a long-running program is doing. It could also be used as a profiling
tool, getting information about how many times individual expressions
are used.

BUG FIX release of regex-tdfa-1.1.2. ChrisK
announced
version 1.1.2 of regex-tdfa,
a bug-fix release.

Silkworm game. Duane Johnson
announced
the release of Silkworm,
a game written in Haskell using Hipmunk
and GLFW.

Discussion Platform policy question: API compatibility in
minor releases. Duncan Coutts
began a discussion
on versioning policies for major and minor releases, for
packages included in the Haskell Platform. See also the newly
started discussion on the purpose of Haskell Platform releases.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them! Magnus Therning: Vim haskellmode packaged
for Arch.

Manuel M T Chakravarty: Instant Generics:
Fast and Easy..

Bjorn Buckwalter: May
2009 HCAR Submissions.

Gtk2HS: Gtk2HS
0.10.1 Released.

Magnus Therning:
Arch
and Haskell, on little snag.

Mikael Vejdemo Johansson (DrSyzygy): Gröbner
bases for operads - Or "What I did in my
vacation".

Mads Lindstrøm: WxGeneric
0.6.0.

Osfameron: Is
currying monadic?.

James Iry: A
Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
Languages.

Duane Johnson: Visualizing
Typed Functions.

Well-Typed.Com: Next
steps for the Haskell Platform.

Don Stewart (dons): The
Haskell Platform.

Luke Palmer: Lazy
Partial Evaluation.

Christopher Lane Hinson: Vec
is Good.

LHC Team: Constructor
specialization and laziness..

Lee Pike: An
Atomic Fibonacci Server: Exploring the Atom
(Haskell) DSL.

John Van Enk: Atom & Arduino ::
First Program (pt. 2).

>>> Chris Forno: Is
Haskell a Good Choice for Web
Applications?.

>>> Sparky: Haskell
and Eclipse [Part 2].

>>> Brit Butler:
Playing
with Haskell.

Duane Johnson: Silkworm
Game written in Haskell.

Matthew Podwysocki: Functional
Composition and Partial Application
.

>>> Takashi: A
Prolog In Haskell.

>>> mokehehe:
Using DirectX
from Haskell.

>>> mokehehe: AO
bench in Haskell.

Quotes of the Week jfredett: My haskell-spider
senses were tingling, I just overshot RT and went for the Halting Problem.
NeilBrown: I heard that if you chant "I don't think this can
be done in Haskell" three times in front of a text editor, Don Stewart
appears and implements it in one line... bos: The last
couple of times I've wanted a book like that, I wrote the book myself. It's
a very effective way to get the book you want, compared to wishing.
edwardk: {-# LANGUAGE time to pay the cutting edge typing
features tax #-} SPJ: Haha this is good news, I have
slipped functional programming into your brain without you realising it
is something very weird. EvilTerran: writing machine
code by hand on tape with a magnetised needle looks good compared to PHP
:P Athas: I like Lisp for its extreme expressivity,
but I think it's easier to make Haskell more powerful, than to make Lisp
more statically safe. roconnor: I can't wait for the
Density Comonad chapter of "learn you a haskell"
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

[Less]

Haskell Weekly News: May 2, 2009

Posted 7 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: May 02, 2009
Welcome to issue 116 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements GHC 6.10.3 prerelease. Ian ... [More] Lynagh
announced
a prerelease
version
of GHC 6.10.3. There have been very
few changes relative to 6.10.2. Unless any major problems are uncovered,
the final release is expected to be built in a couple of days.

graphviz-2009.5.1. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
announced
version 2009.5.1 of the graphviz
library, which provides a Haskell interface
to the GraphViz
program. Major changes include support for polyparse
>= 1.1, dependency on GHC 6.10.*, functions from the Graphalyze
library, and more.

priority-sync-0.1.0.1: Cooperative task
prioritization.. Christopher Lane Hinson
announced
the release of the priority-sync
package for cooperative task prioritization.

HaL4: Local Haskell meeting, Halle/Saale, Germany, June 12. Henning
Thielemann
requested
proposals for talks for HaL4,
a local Haskell meeting in Halle, Germany on June 12.

TraverseAccum: an effectful accumulating map.. Florent Balestrieri
posted
some code implementing an effectful accumulating map.

LondonHUG talk: Engineering Large Projects in Haskell. Don Stewart
posted
slides
from last week's London HUG
talk, which attempts to document some of the tips and tricks Galois has
accumulated using Haskell commercially for the past 10 years.

atom-0.0.2. Tom Hawkins
announced
the release of atom,
a Haskell DSL for designed hard realtime embedded programs. Eaton is
using it to control hydraulic hybrid refuse trucks and shuttle buses.

Bamse-0.9.4, a Windows Installer generator. Sigbjorn Finne
announced
a new version of Bamse,
a package and application for letting you quickly put together Windows
Installers for your software projects/products from within the comforts
of Haskell. New in this release is the support for generating MSIs from
your Cabal projects, having them either be built from source or just have
them be installed and registered at install-time.

Dutch Haskell Users' Group (first meeting: May 6th). Chris Eidhof
announced
the first meeting of the newly formed Dutch Haskell Users'
Group (DHUG), on May 6th at 19:30 in Utrecht.

Haskell Symposium Submission site now open. Stephanie Weirich
announced
that submission to
the Haskell Symposium is now open. The submission deadline is May 8.

OpenGL, GLUT, OpenAL, and ALUT updates. Sven Panne
announced
new
bugfix
releases
for the OpenGL,
GLUT,
OpenAL,
and ALUT
packages.

control-monad-exception-0.1: Explicitly typed exceptions. Pepe
Iborra
announced
the control-monad-exception
package, which provides explicitly typed exceptions for Haskell. The
type of a computation in the EM monad carries a list of the exceptions
that the computation may throw. A exception is raised with 'throw',
which in addition adds it to the type, and captured with 'catch', which
correspondingly removes it from the type. Only safe computations (all
exceptions handled) can escape from the monad.

Haskell File Manager. Michael Dever
announced
the first release of Haskell
File Manager, a program for viewing/managing the files on your
computer. It has all the common functionality you would expect from your
current file manager, copying, moving, deleting, renaming, opening and
searching.

uu-parsinglib-2.0.0. S. Doaitse Swierstra
announced
the release of uu-parsinglib,
the first version of the new parsing combinator library package from
Utrecht University. Features include online result construction, much
simpler internals than the combinators in the uulib package, error
correction, parsing ambiguous grammars, a monadic interface, and more.

Takusen 0.8.4. Alistair Bayley
announced
version 0.8.4 of Takusen,
a database package; this is mostly a "get it working with ghc-6.10"
release.

Discussion Google SoC: Space profiling reloaded. Patai
Gergely
asked
for ideas on his Google Summer of Code project to improve
the Haskell space profiling experience.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Bryan O'Sullivan: Slides
from my Erlang Factory talk this morning.

Thomas Hartman: What
to do when cabal install works in one environment, but not
another..

Christopher Lane Hinson: ANN:
priority-sync.

Well-Typed.Com: "Hello
world" now only 11k using GHC with shared
libs.

The GHC Team: The
new GHC build system is here!.

Well-Typed.Com: First
round of Industrial Haskell Group development
work.

London Haskell Users Group: Don's
slides.

Galois, Inc: Engineering
Large Projects in Haskell: A Decade of FP
at Galois.

JP Moresmau: Haskell
RPG Game uploaded on Hackage!.

Holumbus:
Distributed
data structures.

Niklas Broberg: GSoC09
=> haskell-src-exts ->
haskell-src.

>>> Remco Niemeijer: Forcing
evaluation in Haskell.

Chris Eidhof: Building
commercial Haskell applications.

>>> Lab49:
Differentiating Types
in Haskell.

Quotes of the Week MonadState: Do not try to
change the state; that's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth:
There is no state.
Baughn: Those who would give up essential laziness
for a little ephemeral performance, deserve neither laziness nor
performance. Axman6: what's @flush do? saves stuff
to dick? bos: Crummy languages give static types a
bad name.
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

[Less]

Haskell Weekly News: April 25, 2009

Posted 8 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: April 25, 2009
Welcome to issue 115 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

By all reports, the 5th
Haskell ... [More] Hackathon was a resounding success, with over 50 hackers present
and many interesting Haskell projects worked on!

Announcements
darcs hacking sprint 2 and hac5 report. Eric Kow
sent
out a link to a report
on the second darcs hacking sprint, held as part of the Haskell
Hackathon.

HPong-0.1.2: A simple OpenGL Pong game based on
GLFW. R.A. Niemeijer
announced
the release of HPong,
a simple Pong game implemented using OpenGL and GLFW.

Hac5 roundup. Martijn van Steenbergen
reported
on the 5th Haskell Hackathon. See the wiki page for details,
pictures, and links to blog posts.

HTTP-4000.0.6. Sigbjorn Finne
announced
a new release of the HTTP
package, which adds more robust handling of ill-formed cookies,
and fixes a bug in normalization of certain proxy-bound requests.

dataenc 0.12.1.0. Magnus Therning
announced
version 0.12.1.0 of the dataenc
package. This version adds a bunch of new encodings, including xxencode,
hexadecimal, quoted-printable, python escaping, and url encoding; and
also fixed some bugs.

list-tries-0.0 - first release. Matti Niemenmaa
announced
the first public release of list-tries, a
library providing implementations of finite sets and maps for list keys
using tries, both simple and of the Patricia kind. The data types are
parametrized over the map type they use internally to store the child
nodes: this allows extending them to support different kinds of key types
or increasing efficiency.

curl-1.3.5. Sigbjorn Finne
announced
a new release of the curl
package, which provides Haskell bindings to libcurl. It works with
ghc 6.10.2, taking into account the updated story on how to register
Haskell-based finalizers.

Runge-Kutta library -- solve ODEs. Uwe Hollerbach
announced
a Runge-Kutta
library for numerically solving ordinary differential equations.

funsat-0.6. Denis Bueno
announced
version 0.6 of funsat,
a modern, DPLL-style SAT solver written in Haskell. Funsat solves formulas
in conjunctive normal form and produces a total variable assignment
for satisfiable problems. Version 0.6 adds a representation for logical
circuits (and, or, not, onlyif, iff, if-then-else) supporting efficient
conversion to CNF, and now uses the BSD3 license.

control-monad-exception-0.1: Explicitly typed exceptions. Pepe
Iborra
announced
the control-monad-exception
package, which provides explicitly typed exceptions for Haskell. The
type of a computation in the EM monad carries a list of the exceptions
that the computation may throw. A exception is raised with 'throw',
which in addition adds it to the type, and captured with 'catch', which
correspondingly removes it from the type. Only safe computations (all
exceptions handled) can escape from the monad.

Haskell Implementers' Workshop 2009 (co-located with ICFP). Simon
Marlow
issued
a call for talks to be given at the ACM SIGPLAN Haskell
Implementers' Workshop, to be held on September
3 in Edinburgh, Scotland, in conjunction with ICFP 2009. The
proposal deadline in 15 June. The Haskell Implementers Workshop is a
new workshop to be held alongside ICFP 2009 this year in Edinburgh,
Scotland. There will be no proceedings; it is an informal gathering of
people involved in the design and development of Haskell implementations,
tools, libraries, and supporting infrastructure.

persistent-map-0.0.0. Peter Robinson
announced
the persistent-map
package, which provides a thread-safe (STM) frontend for finite map
types together with a backend interface for persistent storage.

A pragmatic Haskell .NET interop layer, 0.4.0. Sigbjorn Finne
announced
a new release of hs-dotnet,
a Haskell .NET interop layer. It lets you access .NET functionality from
Haskell and vice versa. The new version includes development done since
the start of the year. Apart from rewriting the internals completely to
put it all on a sounder footing, this release includes proper support
for .NET generic types (classes and interfaces), mapping them naturally
on to Haskell parameterized types.

Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) -- first release. atze
announced
the first public release of the Utrecht Haskell Compiler
(UHC). UHC supports almost all Haskell98 features plus many experimental
extensions. The compiler runs on MacOSX, Windows (cygwin), and various
Unix flavors. Features include multiple backends, including a bytecode
interpreter backend and a GRIN based, full program analysing backend;
experimental language extensions, some of which have not been implemented
before; implementation via attribute grammars and other high-level
tools; and ease of experimentation with language variants, thanks to an
aspect-oriented internal organisation.

6.10.3 plans. Ian Lynagh
announced
plans for a 6.10.3 release of GHC, in order to fix the handling of ^C in
ghci. 6.10.3 will also use haskeline instead of editline.

A HERE Document syntax. Jason Dusek
proposed
a lightweight syntax for HERE documents in Haskell.

Discussion Functor and Haskell. Daryoush Mehrtash
asked
about the link between functors in category theory and Haskell's Functor
class; the resulting thread is a good introduction to the connections
between Haskell and category theory for those just learning the latter.

breaking too long lines. Christian Maeder
asked
how to break long lines in Haskell source, leading to an interesting
discussion of coding style.

Jobs Haskell consultant wanted to develop small, Mac-based
utility in Haskell or AppleScript. R J
announced
an opportunity to develop a short program to annotate lists of words with
their definitions.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Twan van Laarhoven: Where
do I get my non-regular types?.

Sebastian Fischer: Reinventing
Haskell Backtracking.

Darcs: darcs
hacking sprint #2 report.

Well-Typed.Com: Platform
progress and the Hackathon.

Roman Cheplyaka: Hac5:
the rest of the story (almost).

Twan van Laarhoven: A
non-regular data type challenge.

Magnus
Therning: dataenc
0.12.1.0 released.

Galois, Inc: Portland
Next Week: ICFP PC Functional Programming
Workshop.

Christophe Poucet (vincenz): Flattening
Data.Map.

Roman Cheplyaka: Hac5:
second day.

Xmonad: contribs
review.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Loose
ends and register pairing.

Sean Leather: Latest
on the incremental fold and
attributes.

>>> Matthew Podwysocki: Functional
Solution for the Shortest Path Problem
.

Chris Smith: Code
for Manipulating Graphs in Haskell.

Austin Seipp:
A
little fun with Haskabelle. Proving things about
*existing* Haskell code in Isabelle.

Tupil: Running
Happstack applications with
FastCGI.

Martijn van Steenbergen: Hac5-Saturday.

beelsebob: Bottoms.

Antoine Latter: Using
Haskeline.

Darcs: darcs
weekly news #26.

Martijn van Steenbergen: Hacking
GHC-What I've learned.

>>> Brandon Simmons: Initial
tests of Tries: Follow Up.

>>> Lab 49: The Algebra of Data, and the
Calculus of Mutation.

Martijn van Steenbergen: Hac5-Friday.
Pictures from the Hackathon.

>>> Matthew Podwysocki: Haskell
and Collective Intelligence .

Quotes of the Week Gracenotes: foldr chosen for
its magical evil terminating powers
uninverted: Moving from lisp to haskell with respect to
functions is like moving from c to perl with respect to strings.
Berengal: [On infinitely fast computers] The OS probably
has a failsafe built in: If a program is running it's in an infinite
loop and needs to be killed... nikki93: After a bit
more delving, I've come to see the power of haskell at last. You have
to treat functions like crap, forget about the C idea that they're 'big
things'. They're not. Berengal: I was squashing a bug,
got frustrated, and typed "fix error" in ghci...
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

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Haskell Weekly News: April 17, 2009

Posted 8 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: April 17, 2009
Welcome to issue 114 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

The 5th Haskell Hackathon
is ... [More] underway in Utrecht! Happy Haskell hacking! An early HWN this week since I
will be traveling this weekend (but not, unfortunately, to the Hackathon).

Announcements Reminder: Haskell Communities and Activities
Report. Janis Voigtlaender
reminded
everyone that the deadline for the May
2009 edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report is only
two weeks away. If you haven't already, please write an entry for your
new project, or update your old entry.

primes. Sebastian Fischer
announced
the release of the primes
package, which implements lazy wheel sieves for efficient, purely functional
generation of prime numbers in Haskell.

level-monad-0.3. Sebastian Fischer
announced
version 0.3 of the package level-monad,
which implements breadth-first search directly as an instance of MonadPlus
(without using an intermediate tree representation). Version 0.3 adds a
MonadPlus instance for iterative deepening inspired by Michael Spivey's
paper on Algebras
for combinatorial search.

hgettext 0.1.10. Vasyl Pasternak
announced
a new release of the hgettext
package, which now has bindings to all gettext functions.

Haskell logo in TeX. Philip Hölzenspies
announced
a version of the new Haskell logo
design prepared using TikZ, for inclusion in LaTeX documents.

The Monad.Reader (14) - Call for copy. Wouter Swierstra
issued
a call for copy for Issue 14 of The
Monad.Reader. The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2009. Let Wouter
know if you intend to submit something -- the sooner, the better.

time 1.1.2.4. Ashley Yakeley
announced
the release of time
1.1.2.4, which should now compile on Windows.

Discussion Code Golf. Sebastian Fischer
started
a lively round of code golf with his code for list diagonalization.

Converting IO [XmlTree] to [XmlTree]. rodrigo.bonifacio
asked
how to convert an IO [XmlTree] into an [XmlTree], leading to
a discussion of Haskell pedagogy.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Roman Cheplyaka: Fun in
Utrecht.

Roman Cheplyaka: Utrecht:
first impressions.

>>> Daniel van den Eijkel: Hommage:
Haskell Offline Music Manipulation And Generation
EDSL.

>>> Brandon Simmons: Some
initial tests of Tries.

Christopher Lane Hinson: Trends
in Profiling Haskell.

>>> Larry O'Brien: Windows
& .NET Watch: Haskell: It's like Klingon, but
with math!.

Sean Escriva: Why
Haskell is a joy to learn.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Instruction
counts on x86 vs SPARC.

Sebastian Fischer: Barefaced
pilferage of monadic
bind.

Benjamin L. Russell: Climbing
the Towers of Hanoi with Haskell-style Curry from a Monadic Container
(While Sparing the Sugar!).

Quotes of the Week Gracenotes: And then the type
system goes all crazy and demands that x and 1 are both Word32s!
mauke: data What a = No; instance Monad What where {
return _ = No; No >>= _ = No } pumpkin: makes
the next internet hit video, 2 natural transformations, 1 functor
mmorrow: a functor is like an analogy between two
analogies FliPPeh: @faq Can Conficker be rewritten
in Haskell? <lambdabot> <no location info>: parse error
on input `:' HairyDude: The Haskell Type System is
a Harsh Mistress.. there ain't no such thing as a free theorem.
LeCamarade: Now, let's say the set is {Haskell, SML, Ruby,
Tomatoes, Human, Cabbage, Noise, IRC}. pjdelport:
YO DAWG I HERD YOU LIKE CARS SO WE PUT A PAIR IN YO CAR SO YOU CAN CAR
WHILE YOU CAR Babelfish: And there you travel: a beam
tracer! Naturally, there are many things that ought to be amend.
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

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Haskell Weekly News: April 13, 2009

Posted 8 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: April 13, 2009
Welcome to issue 113 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements xmobar-0.9.2. Andrea ... [More] Rossato
announced
the release of xmobar-0.9.2, which
features a fix for a longstanding resource leakage bug, new nested color
definitions, and more.

CFP Haskell Symposium 2009. Stephanie Weirich
reminded
everyone that there are only 4 weeks until the submission deadline
for the 2009 Haskell
Symposium!

hmatrix-static: statically-sized linear algebra. Reiner Pope
announced
the release of hmatrix-static,
a thin wrapper over Alberto Ruiz's excellent hmatrix library for
linear algebra. The main additions of hmatrix-static over hmatrix are
that vectors and matrices have their length encoded in their types,
and vectors and matrices may be constructed and destructed using view
patterns, affording a clean, safe syntax.

haskellmode for Vim now at projects.haskell.org. Claus Reinke
announced
that the Haskell mode plugins for Vim have just completed their move to
their new home,
and took the opportunity to reiterate what they can do (quite a lot,
it seems), and mention that some screencasts are available.

MSem replacement for QSem. ChrisK
announced
MSem, a
proposed replacement module for Control.Concurrent.QSem.

Hac5 is almost upon us!. Sean Leather
reminded
everyone that in six days, tens of crazy/obsessed, type-safe, functional
programmers will be converging on Utrecht to commence execution of the
5th Haskell Hackathon,
from April 17-19, 2009 in Utrecht, The Netherlands! The local organizing
team welcomes you all and looks forward to all of the new developments
that come out of everyone's undying quest to write more and better code.

Yogurt-0.4. Martijn van Steenbergen
announced
version 0.4 of Yogurt,
a functional MUD client. Version 0.4 makes Yogurt available as a standalone
executable that is able to dynamically load and reload Yogurt scripts.

Elerea, another FRP library. Patai Gergely
announced
the release of Elerea,
aka "Eventless reactivity", a minimalistic FRP implementation
that comes with a convenient applicative interface, supports
recursive definition of signals and signals fed from outside
by IO actions, plays nice with resources, and is the result
of some furious hacking. There are working examples to show
off the current capabilities of the library, found in the separate elerea-examples
package.

tree-monad 0.2. Sebastian Fischer
announced
version 0.2 of the tree-monad
package, which provides instances of MonadPlus that represent the
search space of non- deterministic computations as a tree. Version 0.2
implements an optimized CPS version of the tree.

HCard -- A library for implementing card-like structures.. Joe
Fredette
announced
the release of HCard,
a library which supports a card-like data structures and uses associated
types to provide shuffling, dealing, and other facilities. It's general
enough to support many different types of playing cards; it currently comes
with the common "French Deck" (4-suit, 13 card deck that is very common
in the US) implemented and an example cribbage scoring application.

SVGFonts 0.1. Tillmann Vogt
announced
his first Haskell library, SVGFonts
0.1, which parses the relatively unknown SVG Font format to produce
outlines of characters. The big advantage of this format is that it is XML,
which means easy parsing and manipulating.

network-bytestring 0.1.2. Johan Tibell
announced
a new release of network-bytestring,
a Haskell library for fast socket I/O using ByteStrings. New in this
release is support for scatter/gather I/O (also known as vectored
I/O). Scatter/gather I/O provides more efficient I/O by using one system
call to send several separate pieces of data and by avoiding unnecessary
copying.

Jobs Lecturer in Computer Science, University of
Leicester. Roy L. Crole
announced
an opening for a lectureship at the University of Leicester. The successful
candidate will have a strong or promising research record in computer
science, with a background in formal foundations (either algorithms and
complexity, or semantics of programming or modelling languages), and
will be able to contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching
and supervision in software engineering.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Mark Wassell: Edge Detection in
Haskell.

Sean Leather: Latest
on the incremental fold and
attributes.

Sean Leather: Haskell
mode for Vim on a Mac.

Sean Leather: Incremental
attributes.

>>> Human Constraints:
Haskell
Type Hackery.

LHC Team: A
new beginning..

London Haskell Users Group: Don
Stewart: Engineering Large Projects in Haskell: A Decade
of Haskell at Galois.

Ulisses Costa: More
Hylomorphisms in Haskell.

Ulisses Costa: Anamorphisms
in Haskell.

London Haskell Users Group: Next
Meeting: Don Stewart from Galois.

LHC Team: Hello
world!.

mightybyte: Adding
Authentication to the Blog App.

Leon Smith: Polynomial
multiplication.

Joe Fredette: Card
games, scorekeeping, and ... Associated
Datatypes?.

mightybyte: Basic
Happstack Blog App.

mightybyte: A
Standalone Auth Framework for
Happstack.

Mads Lindstrøm: Introducing
WxGeneric.

happstack.com: 2
new projects that use Happstack.

>>> Brant Carlson: Lightning
Modeling in Haskell.

Leon Smith: Lloyd
Allison's Corecursive Queues.

About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

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Haskell Weekly News: April 5, 2009

Posted 8 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: April 05, 2009
Welcome to issue 112 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements hgettext-0.1.5 - GetText ... [More] based
internationalization of Haskell programs. Vasyl Pasternak
announced
a new release of the hgettext
package for internationalization of Haskell programs, which now supports
distribution and installation of PO files.

Buster 0.99.1, a library for application orchestration that is not
FRP. Jeff Heard
announced
the release of Buster, an
FRP-like framework for constructing reactive programs with a bus model.

Call for Contributions - Haskell Communities and Activities Report,
May 2009 edition. Janis Voigtlaender
issued
a call for contributions to the 16th edition of the Haskell Communities &
Activities Report. The submission deadline is 1 May 2009. If you are
working on any project that is in some way related to Haskell, please
write a short entry and submit it. Even if the project is very small or
unfinished or you think it is not important enough -- please reconsider
and submit an entry anyway!

fad 1.0 -- Forward Automatic Differentiation library. Bjorn
Buckwalter
announced
the initial release of the Haskell fad
library, developed by Barak A. Pearlmutter and Jeffrey Mark Siskind. Fad
provides Forward Automatic Differentiation (AD) for functions polymorphic
over instances of 'Num'.

hledger 0.4 released. Simon Michael
announced
the release of hledger 0.4, a text-mode
double-entry accounting tool. It reads a plain text journal file
describing your transactions and generates precise activity and balance
reports. Changes include the ability to serve reports in a web browser,
and many other fixes and improvements.

GHC version 6.10.2. Ian Lynagh
announced
a new patchlevel release of GHC. This release contains a number
of bugfixes relative to 6.10.1, including some performance fixes; see the release
notes.

Beta of Leksah IDE available. Jürgen Nicklisch-Franken
announced
release 0.4.4 of Leksah, the
Haskell IDE written in Haskell. Current features include on the fly error
reporting with location of compilation errors, completion , import helper
for constructing import statements, module browser with navigation to
definition, project management support based on Cabal with a visual editor,
"source candy", and more.

satchmo: monadic SAT encoding library. Johannes Waldmann
announced
a preliminary version of satchmo, a monadic
library for encoding boolean and integral number constraints to CNF-SAT. It
uses minisat as a backend solver.

vacuum-cairo: a cairo frontend to vacuum for live Haskell data
visualization. Don Stewart
announced
the release of vacuum-cairo,
a Haskell library for interactive rendering and display of values on the
GHC heap using Matt Morrow's vacuum library. This library takes vacuum's
output, generates dot graph format from it, renders it to SVG with
graphviz, and displays the resulting structure using the gtk2hs Cairo
vector graphics bindings ... all at the GHCi command line. Watch some
screencasts!

vacuum: extract graph representations of ghc heap values.. Matt
Morrow
announced
the release of vacuum, a library
for extracting graph representations of values from the GHC heap, which
may then be further processed and/or translated to Graphviz dot format
to be visualized.

new release of HTTP, version 4000.0.5. Sigbjorn Finne
announced
a new
version of the HTTP package, which includes a bunch of fixes and
cleanups along with some API documentation.

type-level programming support library. spoon
asked
for feedback on a support library for
type level programming.

cmonad 0.1.1. Lennart Augustsson
announced
the CMonad
package, which allows one to write Haskell code in a C style.

Marketing Haskell. Ketil "Simon Peyton-Jones" Malde
announced
the new official
Haskell mascot.

Haskell Platform: status update and call for volunteers. Duncan
Coutts
gave an update
on the status of the Haskell
Platform. There are no more policy questions to resolve for the first
release. It is a matter of getting things done. The first platform release
will contain ghc-6.10.2, the "extra libs", haddock, happy and alex,
and the cabal command line tool and it's dependencies. We are calling
for volunteers for an action group. We need volunteers to take charge of
various platforms and to manage the overall release. See Duncan's email
for a list of what is needed, and volunteer!

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Jeff Heard: Major
updates to Buster.

Bjorn Buckwalter: ANNOUNCE:
fad 1.0---Forward Automatic Differentiation for
Haskell.

Roman Cheplyaka: Hpysics
GrapeFruit (and
hackathon).

Joachim Breitner: Bejeweled
AI in Haskell.

>>> iampalmmute: Vacuum
Ubigraph. Visualizing
Haskell values in 3D.

Jeff Heard: ANN:
Buster, the not quite entirely unlike FRP
library..

Edward Kmett: Reflecting
On Incremental Folds.

beelsebob: How
you should(n't) use Monad.

Sean Leather: Incremental
attributes.

Jeff Heard: Almost,
but not quite entirely unlike
FRP..

>>> Gregory Collins: Building
a website with Haskell, part
2.

>>> Rubin Mcgowan: Irradiation
Tracing in Haskell.

Conal Elliott: Notions
of purity in Haskell.

mightybyte: Finished
HAppS Application.

Sean Leather: Experiments
with EMGM: Emacs org files.

Yi: Haddock
is back.

>>> Lab 49: Does Haskell Support
Subtyping? It Depends..

>>> Tim Lopez: Haskell
Performance: Lowercase.

>>> Gregory Collins: Building
a website with Haskell, part 1.

happstack.com: Happstack-powered
Website launched by Gregory David Collins.

>>>
LispCast: Writing
map in Haskell.

>>> hellfeuer: Laziness
and Dynamic Programming.

>>> Leon Smith: Lloyd
Allison's Corecursive Queues.

Quotes of the Week mstr: haskell is like
f'gg'fggf'fg'g'fg'foldliftM2 f g ''f' :)
simonmar: Wondering how popular Haskell needs to become
for intel to optimize their processors for my runtime, rather than the
other way around quicksilver: [about uninstalling
packages installed with cabal-install] packages are for life, not just
for christmas. Ethereal: If this conversation had been
had in #python #ruby or #php it would have lots of angry people shouting
about how it doesn't matter or isn't true or isn't important and what's
the point, and no, you guys are like ahhh but no, your preconceived
notions of dimensional space are so passe. Duqicnk:
a monad is like a train that runs backwards in time, which is made of
tiny chocolate robots jfredett: I do all of my version
numbers in Roman Numerals... Cale: But in another
sense, functional programmers are applied logicians who spend all their
time proving trivial theorems in interesting ways in an inconsistent
intuitionist logic.
About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to
the Haskell
mailing list as well as to the
Haskell Sequence and Planet
Haskell. RSS
is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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

[Less]