GHC

General
Development
Edit

News

[82 total ]
Haskell Weekly News: March 21, 2008

Posted 8 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: March 21, 2009
Welcome to issue 110 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Facebook
apps with Happstack ... [More] , Sudoku
with Cryptol, what next? Tic-tac-toe with darcs? Anyway,
lots of neat stuff this week, including new releases of GHC,
jhc,
and the Monad.Reader,
some fun visualizations,
and more. Also, students: apply to work on a Haskell
project for the Google Summer of Code!

Announcements
GHC 6.10.2 Release Candidate 1. Ian Lynagh
announced
the first release
candidate for GHC 6.10.2. Please test as much as possible; bugs are
much cheaper if we find them before the release!

jhc 0.6.0 Haskell Compiler. John Meacham
announced
the release of jhc 0.6.0.

Safe Lazy IO in Haskell. Nicolas Pouillard
announced
the safe-lazy-io
package that provides special types and combinators for performing
safe lazy I/O.

game-tree - a library for searching game trees. Colin Paul Adams
announced
game-tree
0.1.0.0, which provides a class for dynamic game trees, and purely
functional algorithms for searching them.

random-shuffle package. Manlio Perillo
announced
the availability of the random-shuffle
package, which is based on Oleg's
description.

random-stream package. Manlio Perillo
announced
the random-stream
package, which provides a portable interface for the operating system
source of pseudo random data. Supported sources are Unix /dev/urandom,
Win32 CryptGenRandom and OpenSSL pseudo random numbers generator.

language-python. Bernie Pope
announced
the language-python
package, which provides a parser (and lexer) for Python, written in
Haskell. Currently it only supports version 3 of Python (the most recent
version), but it will support version 2 in the future.

Google Summer of Code. Malcolm Wallace
announced
that haskell.org has once again been accepted as a mentoring organisation
for the 2009 Google Summer of Code. Student applications open on Monday
(23rd March) at 1900 UTC, for a period of 12 days (until Fri 3rd April,
also at 1900 UTC). Students applicants are encouraged to interact with
the community via mailing lists, prior, during, and after the submission
of their ideas for projects. Because (sadly) the darcs community did not
get accepted as a separate organisation this year, haskell.org will be
willing to accept proposals relating to darcs.

regex-tdfa-1.1.0. ChrisK
announced
the release of regex-tdfa-1.1.0.
This version is a small performance update to the old regex-tdfa-1.0.0
version. Previously all text (e.g. ByteString) being search was converted
to String and sent through a single engine; the new version uses a type
class and SPECIALIZE pragmas to avoid converting to String. This should
make adding support for searching other Char containers easy to do.

Haskell on your system? Information wanted!. Don Stewart
announced
that haskell.org now features links to wiki pages explaining how to obtain
Haskell on windows, mac osx and linux and bsd. If you're a distro maintainer
for these systems, please consider adding relevant pointers to the pages,
so that users of these systems can find all the info they need.

libffi 0.1 released. Remi Turk
announced
the release of libffi
0.1, bindings to the C library libffi, allowing C functions to be
called whose types are not known before run-time.

Haskell Logo Voting has started!. Eelco Lempsink
announced
that voting has begun to choose the new Haskell logo. All subscribed
to haskell-cafe should have received a ballot; if you are not directly
subscribed, you can still send ballot requests until the end of the
competition (March 24, 12:00 UTC). Make sure the message contains 'haskell
logo voting ballot request' in the subject. A long discussion of what
color to paint the bike shed and why this particular bike shed will not
do for storing bikes ensued.

The Monad.Reader (13). Wouter Swierstra
announced
that a new issue of The
Monad.Reader, a quarterly magazine about functional programming,
is now available. Issue 13 consists of the following four articles:
"Rapid Prototyping in TEX" by Stephen Hicks; "The Typeclassopedia" by
Brent Yorgey; a Real World Haskell book review by Chris Eidhof and Eelco
Lempsink; and "Calculating Monads with Category Theory" by Derek Elkins.

dzen-utils 0.1. Felipe Lessa
announced
the release of dzen-utils
0.1, which contains various utilities for creating dzen input strings
in a type-safe way using some combinators, including the ability to apply
colors locally (instead of applying for everything beyond some point). It
can also emulate dbar and gdbar, do automatic padding, and more.

Discussion transformers versus mtl. Ganesh Sittampalam
began a discussion
on the relative status of the 'transformers' and 'mtl' packages.

least fixed points above something. Jens Blanck
asked
about a function to compute fixed points starting from a seed value
(as opposed to computing the least defined fixed point).

Type equality proof. Martijn van Steenbergen
requested
feedback on a proposed module collecting utilities for working with
type equality proofs.

What unsafeInterleaveIO is unsafe. Yusaku Hashimoto
began a discussion
by asking why unsafeInterleaveIO is considered unsafe, or under what
circumstances its use can be considered safe.

Jobs How do students learn Haskell? Postgraduate project at
University of Kent. S.J.Thompson
announced
that funding is available for a postgraduate
project to study how students learn Haskell, based on the
wealth of data collected through the instrumented version of the Helium system for Haskell. The
project will be supervised by Simon Thompson and Sally Fincher, in
collaboration with Jurriaan Hage, Utrecht University.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Neil Mitchell: Concise
Generic Queries. Neil compares solving a query problem with several
different generic programming libraries.

Jeff Heard: Preview:
Data Waves. A neat new type of data visualization,
built using Hieroglyph.

>>> necrobious: A
fun example of Haskell's
newtype.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Peak
issue rate is 18.64 Gig
instrs/sec.

happstack.com: Jeremy
Shaw creates first Facebook App with
Happstack.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Peak
performance.

Galois, Inc: Solving
Sudoku Using Cryptol.

Xmonad: xmonad
on ubuntu. A tutorial on getting started
with xmonad on Ubuntu.

Don Stewart (dons): Visualising
the Haskell Universe. Pretty dependency graphs of
ten thousand Haskell modules!

>>> Sean Chapel: Haskell.

>>> Dean Berris: The
Haskell Experiment: HaskellDB, HTTP, and
Monads.

Holumbus: Hayoo!
Update. The Hayoo! package index has been updated to include
everything currently on Hackage!

>>> John Wiegley: Journey
into Haskell, Part 1. John ventures
down the rabbit hole.

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

Bjorn Buckwalter: Extended
sessions with the Haskell Curl
bindings.

Brent Yorgey: Monad.Reader
#13 is out!.

Manuel M T Chakravarty:
Final
version of "GPU Kernels as Data-Parallel Array
Computations in Haskell"..

Xmonad: Visualising
xmonad.

Darcs: darcs
weekly news #21.

mightybyte: Transactional
Integrity Problem.

>>> Dean Berris: The
Haskell Experiment: Learning a New Programming
Language.

>>> John Wiegley: Hello
Haskell, Goodbye Lisp.

Quotes of the Week ray: three dimensional zippers
make my scalp hurt when i get my hair caught in them
dolio: [regarding a paypal spam message on #haskell]
Take that, Harrop! Does OCaml have illegal cracking utilities?
lament: I think I speak for everyone in this channel when
I say haskell is absolutely horrible and nobody would ever want to use
it MiguelMitrofanov: The first glimpse of this [logo]
vote scared me so much that I've closed the page, stopped the browser, and
shut my computer down. osfameron: <ImInYourMonad>
can I store gtk2hs-Buttons in a datastructure? <osfameron>
ImInYourMonad: I think you have to sew them on with gtk2hs-Thread
chrisdone: I think you mean Peyton `Simon` Jones.
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: March 14, 2009

Posted 9 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: March 14, 2009
Welcome to issue 109 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Congratulations to the authors of RWH on ... [More] their Jolt
award! Some cool libraries released
this week (as usual), and some really cool PhD 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 moved
to Portland and will be starting a PhD at Portland State soon.

Announcements darcs fundraising drive - only $720 left to
go!. Eric Kow
announced
that 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
announced
the initial release of 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
requested
feedback on infrastructure for logging run-time
events and a graphical viewer program called ThreadScope. The goal is for
these features to make it into the next release of GHC.

torch-0.1. Yusaku Hashimoto
announced
a new unit test framework, torch-0.1.

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

happs-tutorial 0.8. Crieghton Hogg
announced
the release of happs-tutorial
0.8, which is compatible with 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
announced
the 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
announced
three new libraries: Holumbus-MapReduce,
Holumbus-Distribution,
and Holumbus-Storage,
which provide tools for building distributed
systems. These libraries are used as the backbone of the Holumbus search
engine.

Turbinado V0.6. Alson Kemp
announced
the release of 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
announced
the hackage release of iteratee-0.1.0.
This library implements enumerators and iteratees as proposed by Oleg
Kiselyov.

Harpy 0.4.4 - Runtime code generation for x86 machine code. Dirk
Kleeblatt
announced
the release of 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. Maurí­cio
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
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 Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Braden Shepherdson: Pimp
Your XMonad #4: Urgency Hooks.

Thomas M. DuBuisson: Explicit
Parallelism via Thread Pools.

Ketil Malde: Current
developments. Ongoing development of the biohaskell
libraries for bioinformatics.

Philip Wadler: Cafe
Scientifique. Philip will be giving a talk,
"Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century
Computing", on Monday in Edinburgh.

Yi: Yi
0.6.0 Release Notes.

Alson Kemp: ANNOUNCE:
Turbinado V0.6.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Thread
activity plotting.

Real-World Haskell: We
won a Jolt Award!.

Real-World Haskell: Real
World Haskell on the Kindle 2.

Christophe Poucet (vincenz): Bootstrapping
cabal.

Gtk2HS: Mickinator
File Manager.

Osfameron: (rough)
Grids in Haskell. Some notes on representing 2D
grids in Haskell.

Manuel M T Chakravarty:
These
graphs summarise the performance of Data Parallel
Haskell....

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Project
midpoint.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: The
GNU Debugger and me.

Don Stewart (dons): Evolving
faster Haskell programs. Using genetic algorithms
to find optimal flag combinations.

Xmonad: Xmonad
and the Gimp.

Xmonad: xmonad
on eee.

Mark Wassell: Conversations
with a type checker.

Holumbus: Holumbus-MapReduce
on Hackage. Some neat libraries for
building distributed systems!

Darcs: darcs
weekly news #20.

Nick Mudge:
First Bay Area
Haskell Meeting.

Dan Piponi (sigfpe): 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
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: March 7, 2009

Posted 9 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: March 07, 2009
Welcome to issue 108 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

The ICFP programming contest will be ... [More] held from 26-29th June!
It's not too early to start thinking about putting a team together.

Announcements tar 0.3.0.0. Duncan Coutts
announceda
major new release of the tar
package for handling ".tar" archive files. This release has a completely
new and much improved API.

storable 0.1 -- Storable type class for variable-sized
data. Tomáš Janoušek
announced
the first release of the storable
library, which fills the gap between Foreign.Storable and Data.Binary
by adding support for marshalling (finite) values of variable-sized
data types, like lists or trees, while preserving the performance and
memory efficiency one expects from the Storable class. It also provides a
(monadic) syntactic sugar that takes care of alignment restrictions by
itself and makes instance deriving easy.

CFP: Submit a talk proposal to CUFP. Kathleen Fisher
requested
talk proposals for CUFP.

The Industrial Haskell Group. Duncan Coutts
announced
the creation of the Industrial
Haskell Group (IHG). The IHG is an organisation to support the needs
of commercial users of the Haskell programming language. Currently, the
main activity of the IHG is a collaborative development scheme, in which
multiple companies fund work on the Haskell development platform to their
mutual benefit. The scheme has started with three partners of the IHG,
including Galois and Amgen.

pandoc 1.2. John MacFarlane
announced
the release of pandoc
version 1.2. The most significant new feature is support for literate
Haskell; you can now use pandoc directly on literate Haskell source files
to produce syntax-highlighted HTML output.

A Haskell binding for the Augeas API. Jude
announced
a Haskell
FFI binding for the Augeas configuration editing API.

Haskell Logo Voting will start soon!. Eelco Lempsink
announced
that voting for
the new Haskell logo will begin on March 16! Everyone subscribed to
haskell-cafe will receive a ballot; if you are not subscribed but would
like to vote, email Eelco with the subject "haskell logo voting ballot
request" and include a short, unique message.

Happstack 0.2 Released. Matthew Elder
announced
the release
of Happstack
0.2.

Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses: emgm-0.3. Sean
Leather
announced
the third major release of Extensible
and Modular Generics for the Masses (EMGM), a library for
generic programming in Haskell using type classes and a sum-of-products
view. Deriving is now greatly improved, and there are several new functions,
including case, everywhere, and everywhere'.

major speed improvement: regex-tdfa reaches 1.0.0. ChrisK
proudly announced
the version 1.0.0 release of regex-tdfa.
This is is not just a bug fix release; it is a serious improvement in
the asymptotic running time of the library algorithms.

Discussion Definitions of purity and Lazy IO. Oleg
began a discussion
on lazy IO.

Left fold enumerator - a real pearl overlooked?. Günther Schmidt
began a discussion
of left-fold enumerators and their current status within the community.

Jobs Looking for a co-founder for a startup using
Haskell. Ed McCaffrey
is
looking for a co-founder to work on a startup music project in
Haskell. Email Ed for more information.

Fully-funded doctoral studentships in dependently type programming
at Oxford and Strathclyde. Jeremy Gibbons
announced
two fully-funded doctoral student positions in dependently-typed programming
at Oxford and
Strathclyde.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Holumbus: First
release of Holumbus-MapReduce.

FP Lunch: Breadth
first labelling.

Sean Leather: Experiments
with EMGM: Emacs org files.

Galois, Inc: Call
for Proposals: CUFP 2009.

Matthew Elder: Happstack
0.2 Released.

Yi: Lazy
and Incremental Parsing: the paper.

Xmonad: xmonad
as a multi-head sliding block
puzzle.

Don Stewart (dons): Playing
with GHC's parallel runtime.

Bjorn Buckwalter: Extended
sessions with the Haskell Curl bindings.

Manuel M T Chakravarty: Installing
GtK2Hs on a Mac with the native GTK OS X
Framework..

Alex Mason: If
you need speed, don't talk to
main!.

Luke Palmer: New
game: SpaceBattle.

Galois, Inc: Galois
Tech Talk: Specializing Generators for High-Performance Monte-Carlo
Simulation in Haskell.

Bjorn Buckwalter: Programmer
Man.

Conrad Parker: Random
code: Pretty printing durations in
Haskell.

The GHC Team: New
paper: Runtime Support for Multicore Haskell.

ganesh: London
Haskell Users Group.

Manuel M T Chakravarty:
This
is the performance of a dot product of two
vectors of 10....

Sean Leather: Template
Haskell 2.3 or Cabal 1.2? EMGM can't have
both!.

Tom Schrijvers: Complete
and Decidable Type Inference for
GADTs.

Galois, Inc: Trustworthy
Voting Systems.

Well-Typed.Com: The
Industrial Haskell Group.

Sean Leather: Incremental
fold, a design pattern.

Darcs: darcs
weekly news #19.

FP Lunch: Container
eating.

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: February 28, 2009

Posted 9 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: February 28, 2009
Welcome to issue 107 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements Google Summer of Code ... [More] 2009 - mentors
wanted!. Eric Kow
reminded
everyone that darcs will be applying to be a mentoring organisation
for the Google Summer of Code project 2009, and is seeking people to
serve as mentors. You need not be a darcs expert to serve as a mentor!

c2hs 0.16.0. Duncan Coutts
announced
the release of c2hs
version 0.16.0, a tool which assists in the development of
Haskell bindings to C libraries by extracts interface information
from C header files and generating Haskell code with foreign imports
and marshaling. The major change in this release is that it now uses the Language.C
library.

X Haskell Bindings 0.2. Antoine Latter
announced
the 0.2.* series release of the X
Haskell Bindings, mostly aimed at making the API prettier. The goal
of XHB is to provide a Haskell implementation of the X11 wire protocol,
similar in spirit to the X protocol
C-language Binding (XCB).

text and text-icu, fast and comprehensive Unicode support using stream
fusion. Bryan O'Sullivan
, on behalf of the Data.Text team, announced
the release of preview versions of two new packages: text
0.1, providing fast, packed Unicode
text support with modern stream fusion, and text-icu
0.1, which augments text with comprehensive character set conversion
support and normalization (and soon more), via bindings to the ICU
library.

Boston Area Haskell User's Group, first meeting on Saturday February
28th. Shae Matijs Erisson
announced
the first meeting of the Boston
Area Haskell User's Group this Saturday, February 28, at
2pm. Directions are on the web page; you can also check out the mailing list.

New version of Hieroglyph released: Hieroglyph 1.1 is on
hackage. Jeff Heard
announced
the release of a new version of Hieroglyph;
the biggest change is that it now uses Russell O'Connor's excellent Data.Colour
library.

bug fix for regex-tdfa, version 0.97.4 (and "regex-ast"). ChrisK
announced
another bug fix release for the regex-tdfa
package, which fixes another tricksy bug. This is now the only known
regex library that passes the entire test suite.

Hac5: April 17-19, Utrecht -- Book Now!. Sean Leather
announced
some updated information regarding the 5th Haskell Hackathon. The
executive summary: hotel or hostel accommodation may be hard to come
by, so book your room now, and check out the website for lots of useful
information.

pkgenv - disposable, isolated pkg environments. Paolo Losi
announced
a tool, pkgenv,
which facilitates setting up isolated, disposable package environments.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
JP Moresmau: A
high-level GUI library for Haskell.

Magnus Therning: More
fun with Cabal, visualising dependencies. Giant
graphs are fun!

Magnus Therning: A no-no in
my book (found in Cabal).

Bryan O'Sullivan: Finally!
Fast Unicode support for Haskell. Data.Text
is here!

happstack.com: Happstack
now outputs Apache Combined
Logs.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Benchmarking.

Christophe Poucet (vincenz): Fibonacci
in the Type System.

Eric Kow (kowey): inkscape
layers.

Magnus Therning: Another reason to
create distro-specific packages for Haskell modules.

boegel: Using
Haskell to win the Netflix Prize.

Magnus
Therning: Simple
Cabal parsing.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Bugfixes
and pretty graphs.

Jeff Heard: New
version of Hieroglyph released..

Chris Done: Vgrabbj
hacking.

Conal Elliott: Paper:
Beautiful differentiation. Another
draft paper from Conal.

happstack.com: Momentum
builds as we approach Happstack 0.2.

Luke Palmer:
RTS
Research.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Sanity.

Darcs: darcs
weekly news #18.

Don Stewart (dons): Can
Haskell give me a pony?. The answer is:
Yes! Haskell can do that.

Neil Mitchell: Hoogle
package search.

Alex Mason: AVar
changes.

Xmonad: Using
gimp under xmonad. It can actually be quite nice,
despite what you might think.

FP-Syd: Sydney
FP Group: FP-Syd #12..

Eric Kow (kowey): implementing
join in terms of (>>=).

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Triage.

Benjamin L. Russell: Learning
Haskell through Category Theory, and Adventuring in Category Land:
Like Flatterland, Only About Categories.

Quotes of the Week lilac: haskell's learning curve
is like this: |
cowardlydragon: [from a reddit comment thread] Don't get
me started on monad. What is that, a man with a single testicle?
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: February 21, 2009

Posted 9 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: February 21, 2009
Welcome to issue 106 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements HWEB. Eric ... [More] Macaulay,
following a little prodding
by Neil Mitchell, has released version 0 of HWEB, a small tool
for producing literate Haskell programs.

Cabal-1.6.0.2 and cabal-install-0.6.2. Duncan Coutts
announced
point-releases of the Cabal library and the cabal-install command line tool.
These releases include a number of fixes and minor improvements, and are
expected to be included with ghc-6.10.2.

Barrie 0.3.1. Fraser Wilson
announced
a hackage release of Barrie,
an implementation of an idea for supporting state based, user-driven
GUIs.

Yogurt-0.3. Martijn van Steenbergen
announced
the release of Yogurt-0.3, a MUD client
library for Haskell. This version improves over 0.2 in several ways,
including support for GHC 6.10, no more unsafeCoerce needed, new support
for forking threads, and various refactorings.

wxFruit-0.1.2. Henk-Jan van Tuyl
announced
an
update
of wxFruit, a
graphical user interface that combines some of the power and versatility
of wxHaskell with the elegance and simplicity of Fruit. The new version
works with GHC 6.10, and also includes a demo game, PaddleBall. Interested
parties, take note: the position of developer/maintainer for this library
is currently open.

Paper draft: "Denotational design with type
class morphisms". Conal Elliott
announced
a draft of a new
paper, "Denotational design with type class morphisms". Feedback is
appreciated, especially if in time for the March 2 ICFP deadline.

Crypto 4.2.0 & Related News. Creighton Hogg
announced
the release of version 4.2.0 of the Crypto
library. Creighton will also betaking over maintenance of the library
from Dominic Steinitz.

The Typeclassopedia, and request for feedback. Brent Yorgey
announced
a first
draft of an article entitled 'The Typeclassopedia', a "starting point
for the student of Haskell wishing to gain a firm grasp of its standard
type classes." Comments and feedback are encouraged!

hslibsvm-2.88.0.1 - A FFI binding to LibSVM. S. Guenther
announced
the hlibsvm
package, a set of Haskell bindings to the C libsvm library.

spacepart-0.1.0.0 (was called data-spacepart). Corey O'Connor
announced
a new release of the spacepart
package, supporting space-partitioning data structures. The new release
includes many bug fixes and some code cleanup.

pqueue-mtl, stateful-mtl. Louis Wasserman
announced
two new packages, stateful-mtl
and pqueue-mtl.
stateful-mtl provides an ST monad transformer, several useful operations
on generic monad transformers, and a monad transformer intended to
cleanly externally wrap operations on a mutable array (including resizing
operations). pqueue-mtl provides implementations of several structures
supporting a generic 'single-in, single-out' paradigm (encapsulated
in a typeclass named Queuelike), including stacks, queues, and several
implementations of priority queues.

haha-0.1 - Animated ascii lambda. Sebastiaan Visser
announced
haha,
a very minimal vector based ascii art library written just for fun. If
you've always wanted to have a full-color rotating vector based ascii
art lambda on your terminal, now is your chance!

Discussion Darcs and Google Summer of Code. Eric Kow
floated
the idea of having darcs apply to the Google Summer of Code as a
separate mentoring organization, and discussed several ideas for student
projects.

Jobs Postdoctoral Research Position at Yale
University. Paul Hudak
announced
the availability of a postdoctoral research position at Yale University. The
successful candidate will apply modern, high-level programming language
ideas (such as embodied in Haskell) to help design and implement a
language for the control of BGP-based network routers, with the goal
of realizing high-level networking protocols for traffic engineering,
security, and related networking concerns.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Triage.

Manuel M T Chakravarty: Mark your Haskell
tweets with #haskell.

Gregg Reynolds:
Performance
Economics.

Alex Mason: AVar
released (three times).

Sean Leather: The
strict danger of switching from pure to monadic
Template Haskell.

Mads Lindstrom: Using
Mutable Arrays for Faster
Sorting.

Conal Elliott: Denotational
design with type class morphisms. A draft
of Conal's new paper.

Jesse Andrews: Getting
Tiled with XMonad.

happstack.com: SOCALFP
Presentation Slides: "Happstack is better
than X".

Luke Palmer: Dependent
types are ridiculously easy.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Thunderbirds
are go.

Brent Yorgey: Typeclassopedia---a
generic response.

Alex Mason: ASTM
updates.

London Haskell Users Group: Lemmih:
LHC - past, present and
future.

Eric Kow (kowey): announcing:
burrito tutorial support group. Laden
with burrito tutorial guilt? The burrito tutorial
support group can help.

Alex Mason: ASTM:
redundant STMish fun.

happstack.com: Announcing
the launch of the Patch-Tag blog.

Colin Ross:
XML
parsing with Haskell.

Brent Yorgey: The
Typeclassopedia---request for
feedback.

Sean Leather: Incremental
fold, a design pattern.

Manuel M T Chakravarty:
Comparison
of type families with functional dependencies.. A
nice summary comparison of these two Haskell language
features.

Random permutations and sorting: Heinrich
Apfelmus.

A day with xmonad:
Colin
Adams.

Antoine Latter: MaybeT
- The CPS Version.

Gregg Reynolds:
Intergalactic
Telefunctors and Quantum Entanglement.

Gregg
Reynolds: In Praise
of Elitism.

Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Beyond
Monads. A generalization of monads to
parameterized monads.

Well-Typed.Com: Cabal
ticket #500.

Quotes of the Week KetilMalde: No, those are
quite outdated by now. The new horsemen of the programming apocalypse are,
of course, IO, MutableState, LazyMemoryLeak, and Bottom.
skorpan: i love the layout of lyah. makes me feel like
having some chunky bacon. lilac: * lilac looks forward
to Cale explaining category theory by analogy to Call of Duty
byorgey: _|_ ... is a party pooper idnar:
enlarge your context in just seven days with all-natural herbal
supplements! mmorrow: gah, i'm so used to haskell i
forgot a return stmt in C and was trying to figure out where the segfault
was happening for 20 minutes
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: February 17, 2009

Posted 10 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: February 17, 2009
Welcome to issue 105 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

And here's the Belated Valentine's ... [More] Day HWN! Motto: "Remembering that
you love someone three days after you were supposed to is better than
not remembering at all." Of course, it's late because I spent the weekend
working on the Typeclassopedia (although you won't find a link to it in this
HWN because I've only included things through Saturday). Much Haskell love
to all!

Announcements Plans for GHC 6.10.2. Ian Lynagh
announced
a quick summary of the plans for GHC 6.10.2. If there is a bug not on the high-priority
list that is causing you major problems, please let the developers
know. A release candidate is expected to be ready by the end of the
week.

Bug fix to regex-tdfa, new version 0.97.3. ChrisK
announced
a new
release of regex-tdfa which fixes some additional bugs. Three Cheers
For QuickCheck!

Google Summer of Code 2009. Malcolm Wallace
announced
that haskell.org will once again be applying to be a
Google Summer of Code mentor organization. Now is the time
to begin discussing ideas for student projects. Also, if
you wish to help publicize GSoC amongst students, there are official
posters/fliers available. A long discussion of various project
ideas followed, including some analysis of the factors which contribute
to project success.

happs-tutorial 0.7. Creighton Hogg
announced
the release of happs-tutorial
0.7, the first release of happs-tutorial built against the new Happstack
project. Creighton has now taken over development of the tutorial
from Thomas Hartman.

first Grapefruit release. Wolfgang Jeltsch
announced
the first official release of Grapefruit, a
library for Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) with a focus on user
interfaces. With Grapefruit, you can implement reactive and interactive
systems in a declarative style. User interfaces are described as networks
of communicating widgets and windows. Communication is done via different
kinds of signals which describe temporal behavior.

CFP: 5th Haskell Hackathon, April 17-19, Utrecht. Sean Leather
issued
a call for participation in the 5th Haskell Hackathon,
which will be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from 17-19 April. The
Haskell Hackathon is a collaborative coding festival with a simple focus:
build and improve Haskell libraries, tools, and infrastructure. All are
welcome! See the website for more information, or join the IRC channel
(#haskell-hac5). Please register if you plan to attend!

Take a break: write an essay for Onward! Essays. Simon Peyton-Jones
announced
a call for submissions to Onward! Essays. An
Onward! essay is a thoughtful reflection upon software-related
technology. Its goal is to help the reader to share a new insight, engage
with an argument, or wrestle with a dilemma. The deadline is 20 April.

Data.Stream 0.3. Wouter Swierstra
announced
a new version of the Data.Stream
package, a modest library for manipulating infinite lists. Changes
include support for lazy SmallCheck, an improved Show instance, stricter
scans, various documentation fixes, and several new functions from
Data.List.

X Haskell Bindings 0.1. Antoine Latter
announced
a new release of the X
Haskell Bindings (XHB) library. The goal of XHB is to provide a
Haskell implementation of the X11 wire protocol, similar in spirit to
the X protocol C-language Binding (XCB).

Gtk2HS 0.10.0 released. Peter Gavin
announced
a new
release of Gtk2HS,
the Haskell GTK bindings. Notable changes include support for GHC 6.10,
bindings to GIO and GtkSourceView-2.0, a full switch to the new model-view
implementation using a Haskell model, and many others.

Discussion Haskell.org GSoC. Daniel Kraft
began a discussion
about good topics for a Haskell GSoC project.

Painting logs to get a coloured tree. Joachim Breitner
asked about elegant ways to annotate trees, leading to an interesting discussion.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Conor McBride: FP Lunch: Djinn,
monotonic.

Gregg Reynolds: "Computation" considered
harmful. "Value" not so hot either..

Darcs: darcs
weekly news #17.

Antoine Latter: Dependencies
in Hackage, revisited.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Allocate!.

Chris Done: Updates:
RSS and highlighting.

Chris Done: Simple SMTP
library with plain/login authentication.

The GHC
Team: Ever
wondered how big a closure is?.

Luke Palmer: Dana
update: Core execution language, dependent
combinators.

John Van Enk: Distraction:
Fun with diagrams!.

Magnus Therning:
New
backend for epilicious pushed..

Alex Mason: Shootout
PiDigits program kinda sucks (and possibly
so does GHC).

Gtk2HS: Gtk2Hs
version 0.10.0 released.

Ketil Malde: Notes
from PADL.

Alson Kemp: Kudos
to Bodo.

xmonad: New
layout: XMonad.Layout.Cross.

Gregg
Reynolds: Programming
Language Semiotics.

Gregg Reynolds:
Formal
semantics for side effects.

xmonad: contribs
review: CycleWindows, multimedia keys,
runOrCopy.

Conal Elliott: From
the chain rule to automatic
differentiation.

Arnar Birgisson: The
Non-Determinism Monad.

Matthew Jones:
XMonad: A tiling window
manager written in Haskell.

Gregg
Reynolds: Moggi
:: CT -> Hask.

Lennart Augustsson: More
BASIC.

Quotes of the Week chrisdone: zipWith3 ($) (cycle
[const,flip const]) "hai! haha!" "yarlysotense!"
quicksilver: I'm very unlikely to give the time of
day to anything which doesn't let me continue to use emacs.
roconnor: don't let Float do your finance homework for
you. quicksilver: @go is made of STRING and FAIL.
drhodes: We're sorry Mr. Thunk, but this program is on a
need to run basis, and you don't need to run. Now go away before I call
the garbage collector.
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: February 7, 2009

Posted 10 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: February 07, 2009
Welcome to issue 104 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Community News Andre Pang (ozone) ... [More] will be soon moving
to San Fransisco to begin work with Pixar!

Announcements
Mutually recursive modules. Henning Thielemann
announced
a small
writeup explaining how mutually recursive modules are currently
supported, and how they can be avoided. Please add information about
other compilers and more ideas on breaking cycles.

UrlDisp, a friendly URL dispatching library. Artyom Shalkhakov
announced
the first release of UrlDisp,
a small library for URL dispatching (aka routing). Right
now it works with CGI, and should be compatible with FastCGI
as well (not tested); Happstack compatibility is planned. Documentation and usage
examples are available.

Purely functional LU decomposition. Rafael Gustavo da Cunha
Pereira Pinto
released
some code to perform purely functional LU decomposition.

Ready for testing: Unicode support for Handle I/O. Simon Marlow
announced
that proper Unicode support in Handle I/O is
ready for testing in GHC. Just download the set of
patches, compile GHC with them, and test away! Comments and discussion
welcome.

HaskellWiki Accounts. Ashley Yakeley
can create
a HaskellWiki account for anyone who wants one (account creation has
been disabled as a spam-fighting measure).

multiplicity 0.1.0 released. Dino Morelli
announced
the release of multiplicity
0.1.0, a configuration file driven wrapper around duplicity. It allows you
to easily define backup sets as config files and avoid long, repetitive
command lines.

Happstack 0.1 Released!. Matthew Elder
announced
the 0.1
release of Happstack, the successor
for the HAppS project.

#haskell-in-depth IRC channel. Philippa Cowderoy
announced
the creation of a new IRC channel, #haskell-in-depth. The new channel is
open to everyone, just like #haskell, but is intended for more in-depth
conversations, to allow the #haskell channel to be a more newbie-friendly
place.

regex-posix-unittest-1.0 AND regex-posix-0.94.1 AND
regex-tdfa-0.97.1. ChrisK
announced
an update to the regex-posix
package which provides better semantics
for multiple matches; an update to the regex-tdfa
package, which provides the same new multiple
match semantics and fixes a bug; and finally, a new package, regex-posix-unittest,
along with an accompanying wiki
page; it runs a suite of unit tests which regex-tdfa passes, but reveals
bugs in the standard glibc, OS X, FreeBSD, and NetBSD implementations!

Jane Street Summer Project 2009. Yaron Minsky
announced
the Jane Street Summer Project for
2009, the goal of which is to make functional programming languages
into better practical tools for programming in the real world. Students
will be funded over the summer to work on open-source projects which aim at
improving the practical utility of their favorite functional language.

gitit 0.5.1. John MacFarlane
announced
the release of gitit
0.5.1, a wiki program that uses git or darcs as a filestore and HAppS
as a server. Changes include major code reorganization, bug fixes, new
debugging features, and more.

regex-xmlschema. Uwe Schmidt
announced
the release
of regex-xmlschema,
(yet another) package for processing text with regular expressions,
containing a complete implementation of the W3C XML Schema specification
language for regular expressions.

diagrams 0.2. Brent Yorgey
announced
version 0.2 of the diagrams
package, an embedded domain-specific language for creating simple
graphics in a compositional style. New features include support for
arbitrary paths, text, multiple output formats, and support for the colour
library.

Discussion Haddock Markup. David Waern
began a discussion
on Haddock markup syntax: should it support (La)TeX for embedded
mathematics? Should it support other stuff?

Elegant & powerful replacement for CSS. Conal Elliott
began a discussion
on an elegant replacement for CSS that is consistent, composable,
orthogonal, functional, and based on an elegantly compelling semantic
model---what might such a thing look like?

type metaphysics. Gregg Reynolds
began a long and interesting discussion
on the type system, denotational semantics, and related matters.

Jobs Postdoc Positions at the CLIP group, Spain. CFP
announced
the availability of postdoctoral
research positions within the CLIP
(Computational Logic, Implementation and Parallelism) group in
Madrid, Spain. The application deadlines are February 13th and 18th;
see the original email for more details.

Multiple funded Ph.D. positions available. Martin Erwig
announced
the availability of multiple funded Ph.D. positions in the school of EECS at Oregon State
University, in the areas of programming languages (focusing on DSLs
and language design), software engineering, and HCI. If you are interested,
email Martin with a resume and contact information by February 15.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Erik de Castro Lopo: libsndfile
1.0.18..

>>> Gregg Reynolds: Moggi
:: CT -> Hask. An interesting perspective
on Haskell and category theory.

Osfameron: Functional
Pe(a)rls v2 (now with Monads!) at the London
Perl Workshop 2008.

ezekiel smithburg: google
code project, google group, and darcs repository for
WikimediaParser.

ezekiel smithburg: releasing
WikimediaParser 0.1.

Andre Pang (ozone): Change.

Lennart Augustsson: Is
Haskell fast?.

Lennart Augustsson: Regression.
A library for writing embedded BASIC programs in
Haskell? What is the world coming to?

Galois, Inc: Equivalence
and Safety Checking in Cryptol.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Just
Testing.

Jeff Heard: Hieroglyph:
Interactively graph a spreadsheet in 99 lines
of code..

Jeff Heard: Snippet:
sorting the elements of a map.

LHC Team: Grin
a little..

Alex Mason: Other
shootout news.

Xmonad: contribs
review: SpawnOn.

Jeff Heard: Hieroglyph
Haddock docs.

Alex Mason: More
n-bodies speedups.

Alex Mason: N-bodies
evolution.

Eric Kow (kowey): practical
quickcheck (wanted). Eric is seeking practical advice
on how to effectively use QuickCheck.

Alex Mason: TextMate
haskell bundle improvements.

"Haskell application server stack": Happstack
0.1 Released (one day early!).

"Haskell application server stack": SOCALFP
presentation: patch-tag as a startup using
Happstack.

Neil Mitchell: Monomorphism
and Defaulting.

Jeff Heard: Hieroglyph
Part II, basic mouse/keyboard
interactivity.

Jeff Heard: Introducing
Hieroglyph. Purely functional 2D visualization
on top of Cairo.. The Hieroglyph
library looks pretty cool!

Jeff Heard: Hieroglyph
HOWTO, part I: Sparklines.

Alex Mason: N-bodies
speedup (50%!).

>>> John Lato: Build
a better WAVE reader, pt 2.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Join
Points.

Luke Palmer: Parallel
Rewrite System.

>>> John Lato: Build
a better WAVE reader, pt 1. Notes on building an
'optimal audio I/O library in Haskell'.

Luke Palmer: Dana
update: System U-Box compiler is
go.

Luke Palmer: Dana
needs a self-embedding of U-Box.

Beelsebob: Simulating
n-bodies and functional programming. A beautiful implementation
of an n-bodies simulation using reactive.

Xmonad: New
layout: GridVariants.SplitGrid.

Lane: Christopher
Lane Hinson: MaybeArrow?. An arrow with
possible failure, which still allows later effects to
happen after failure.

Don Stewart (dons): #haskell
is a busy place. Some statistics on the
#haskell IRC channel.

Alson Kemp: Cabal-install
is awesome. Enough said!

FP-Syd: Sydney
FP Group: FP-Syd #11..

Brent Yorgey: Diagrams
0.2 release.

Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Beyond
Regular Expressions: More Incremental String
Matching. More incremental brain expansion
courtesy of Dan.

Don Stewart (dons): Reviving
the Gofer Standard Prelude (circa. 1994). Haskell,
retro-style!

Quotes of the Week sigfpe: If I took some Ritalin,
maybe I could write an entire book on Haskell and algebra.
cjb: It's all fun and games until somebody loses an
IOVar. Gracenotes: You are likely to be eaten by a
poset Gracenotes: A public service announcement:
if you find yourself overusing the Writer monad, tell (Sum 1)
Anonymous: Haskell, the world's leading purely fictional
programming language ehird: 2009: The Year of the
Combinatorial Explosion of Haskell Web Frameworks. Also, the Linux
Desktop. ehird: [on the previous quote] Someone
re-remember that quote when lambdabot's back so I don't have to and
thereby look egotistical, thanks luqui: Hmph! My program
which uses unsafeCoerce everywhere is not working properly! Who'd have
thought...
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: January 31, 2009

Posted 10 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: January 31, 2009
Welcome to issue 103 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements HDBC v2.0 now available. ... [More] John Goerzen
announced
that HDBC
v2.0 is now available. Simultaneously, HDBC-sqlite3,
HDBC-postgresql,
and HDBC-odbc
v2.0 have also been uploaded to Hackage. A
guide to new features and migration can be found
here.

Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses: emgm-0.2. Sean
Leather
announced
the second major release of Extensible
and Modular Generics for the Masses (EMGM), a library for generic
programming in Haskell using type classes and a sum-of-products
view. Improvements over emgm-0.1 include type representation derivation
using Template Haskell, documentation improvements, a bimap function,
and more.

incremental-sat-solver. Sebastian Fischer
announced
the incremental-sat-solver
library, which provides an implementation of the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland
algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem. It not only allows
solving Boolean formulas in one go, but also adding constraints and query
bindings of variables incrementally.

data-spacepart - space partitioning data structure[s] (initial
release). Corey O'Connor
announced
the data-spacepart
package, the goal of which is to be a collection of space partitioning data
structures. Currently, there is only a simple quadtree implementation.

Wired 0.2. Emil Axelsson
announced
a new release of Wired.
The most important news in this release is that it now contains a 45nm
cell library, which means that you can use Wired to create and analyze
modern VLSI designs today!

CFP Haskell Symposium 2009. Stephanie Weirich
announced
a call for papers for the 2009 Haskell Symposium
in Edinburgh, Scotland. The deadline for submissions is May 8.

testpack (first release). John Goerzen
announced
the release of testpack,
a collection of a few utilities for tests: some tools to convert QuickCheck
properties into HUnit test cases, and various shortcuts and tools to
increase verbosity while running tests in both QuickCheck and HUnit.

convertible (first release). John Goerzen
announced
a new package, convertible.
At its heart, it's a very simple typeclass that's designed to enable a
reasonable default conversion between two different types without having
to remember a bunch of functions. The return type from this conversion
is "Either ConvertError a", and conversions are expected to do sanity
checking (such as bounds checking when converting to types like Int),
so as to produce neither garbage nor exceptions as part of the conversion
process. The package also includes instances of the Convertible typeclass
for common type conversions. working with numeric types as well as dates
and times. Notably, it has code to convert between System.Time types and
their Data.Time siblings, and vice versa, a capability I found annoyingly
lacking in the standard library.

Progress with IDE. Juergen Nicklisch-Franken
announced
that the Leksah 0.4.0 pre-release is
now available. Current features include a Haskell customized editor with
candy, project management support based on Cabal, a visual editor for Cabal
files, navigation aids, a module browser, session support, and more.

Hayoo! beta 0.3. Timo B.
announced
the next beta version 0.3 of Hayoo!, the Haskell API
search engine with find-as-you-type and suggestions. Hayoo! now works
even if your browser does not support JavaScript.

DecisionTree 0.0. Adrian Neumann
announced
the DecisionTree
package, which provides an implementation of the ID3 algorithm and can
be used to classify data with discrete valued attributes.

orchid-0.0.7. Sebastiaan Visser
announced
a new release of Orchid,
just another Haskell Wiki. This release
features a number of improvements, including a filestore
backend, searching, deleting and renaming support, and more. Check out
the demo.

gitit 0.5. John MacFarlane
announced
the latest release of Gitit,
the multitalented distributed wiki
written in Haskell. This release uses the filestore
library and hence also supports a darcs backend, and also features
optimizations, better search, better diffs, and more. You can check out
a running example.

filestore 0.1. Gwern Branwen
announced
filestore
0.1, which provides a uniform, abstract, generic interface for storing
versioned files on disk. It allows calling programs to use generic commands
to store strings or binary data and perform various queries, such as 'what
files are in this repository?' or 'what were the contents of this file
at revision XXXXXXX?' or 'give me a diff of this file between revision
XXXXXXX and revision YYYYYYY.' Because the interface is abstract, the
calling program is insulated from the messy details of the backend (which
might be a VCS or a database). Darcs and Git are fully supported. There
are plans for a SQLite backend.

Scurry :: A cross platform (if you put your mind to it) P2P
VPN. John Van Enk
announced
the release of Scurry,
a P2P VPN application written in Haskell (and a little C).

Discussion Why binding to existing widget toolkits doesn't
make any sense. Achim Schneider
began an interesting discussion
on the proper approach to GUI toolkits in Haskell.

Laws and partial values. Henning Thielemann
began a
long thread on the semantics of laws (such as the monoid laws).

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Sebastian Fischer: Using
SmallCheck to Shatter an Audacious Claim.

Xmonad: Quad
head xmonad.

Darcs: darcs
weekly news #15.

Osfameron: More
longest paths, and sick
folds..

Eric Kow (kowey): haskell-ji.

Jeff Heard: Control.Monad.IfElse.

Conal Elliott: What
is automatic differentiation, and why does it
work?.

Luke Palmer: Fun
with PiSigma.

Neil Mitchell: Small
scripts with Haskell.

LHC Team: Release
notes..

LHC Team: Thoughts
on a new code generator.

Xmonad: contribs
review: ThreeColumnsMiddle, CenteredMaster,
Mosaic.

Osfameron: There's
the nub (snippet in Perl and
Haskell).

Malcolm Wallace: codec
implementations.

Sebastian Fischer: Fun
with Infinite Global Constants. Just-in-time,
memoized binomial coefficients.

Chris Done: Some
libgd changes.

Luke Palmer: A
world without orphans. Luke muses on the benefits to be
gained by outlawing orphan instances.

Creighton Hogg: Fear
of releasing code.

LHC Team: Thoughts
on a new code generator.

Don Stewart (dons): What
is Haskell good for?. Lots of things, if this tag cloud
has anything to say about it.

Arch Haskell News: Haskell
wiki stack in Arch.

Conal Elliott: Comparing
formulations of higher-dimensional, higher-order
derivatives.

Conal Elliott: Fostering
creativity by relinquishing the
obvious.

Arch Haskell News: Arch
Haskell News: Jan 11
2009.

Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Fast
incremental regular expression matching with monoids. A very
cool article showing how to use fingertrees storing memoized automaton
transition functions to do fast incremental regular expression matching
(or, in general, fast incremental lexing).

Quotes of the Week lilac: is happpy with his
infinite type. it's ducks all the way across and down.
Gracenotes: You are likely to be eaten by a poset
RossMellgren: Apparently 64-bit GHC is sufficiently advanced
to be indistinguishable from magic. cjb: It's all
fun and games until somebody loses an IOVar. sigfpe:
If I took some Ritalin, maybe I could write an entire book on Haskell
and algebra. ddarius: Nothing is evaluated until
it is.
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: January 24, 2009

Posted 10 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: January 24, 2009
Welcome to issue 102 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements Monoids and fingertrees. ... [More] Heinrich Apfelmus
posted a nice
tutorial explaining the monoid magic behind 2-3 fingertrees.

STM-IO-Hooks-0.0.1. Peter Robinson
announced
the stm-io-hooks
library, which provides an STM monad with commit and retry IO
hooks. A retry-action is run (once) in a separate thread if
the transaction retries, while commit-actions are executed
iff the transaction commits. The code is based on the AdvSTM
monad by Chris Kuklewicz, but in addition also ensures some atomicity
guarantees for commit-actions.

1000 libraries. Don Stewart
announced
that Hackage has now reached
1000 packages!

HTTP-4000.0.4 released. Sigbjorn Finne
announced
that a new release of HTTP,
version 4000.0.4, is now available. The main change is the addition of
registering a Browser event handler for capturing state changes to the
request-response processing pipeline.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Luke Palmer: Existential
Memoization.

Luke Palmer: The
Third Virtue. Luke has a Grand Vision (TM)!

Darcs:
darcs
weekly news #14.

Magnus Therning: More sensible comments
on cabal-debian.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Wait
and perform.

LHC Team: Typeclasses
are working, now we're missing a bunch of
instances....

Andy Gill: Memoization in
GHC. A cool tutorial on how to memoize a pure function with
GHC, without changing the function's definition.

Magnus
Therning: Experience
with cabal-debian.

Joachim Breitner: darcswatch
uploaded to hackage.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project:
The
Strap.

Real-World Haskell: Bryan
O’Sullivan on the Power of
Haskell.

Jeff Heard: Visualizing groundwater
nitrate concentration.

Don Stewart (dons): Open
source releases and
growth.

Lennart Augustsson: Performance
update on LLVM.

Arch Haskell News: Piet
implementation for Arch.

Mark Jason Dominus:
Triples
and Closure. Did you know that monads are like closure
operators? If not, read on.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project:
The
Grind.

LHC Team: Functions
in Haskell..

Magnus Therning: Building Debian packages
of (cabalised) Haskell packages.

Xmonad: xmonad
cheatsheet.

Xmonad: xmonad
on twitter.

Jeff Heard: A random note
on programming with Gtk2Hs..

Xmonad: xmonad
0.8.1 : GHC 6.10 maintenance
release.

Jonathan Tang: Some
observations on Kinds.

Martijn van Steenbergen: Type
Synonym Families.

Quotes of the Week Jonathan Cast: [on advertising
for Haskell programmers and informing them that the codebase is actually in
Perl at the interview] <Andrew Wagner> That's......evil. <Jonathan>
I know. I'm evil too, though. So it's cool.
rwbarton: A type class is not a type just like a dog house
is not a dog. SPJ: [This is] clearly not a bug in
GHC; but it would be more felicitous if it gave you a warning...
Gracenotes: > let o_o = 0.0 ;o' =(, ); ;o (*)=(*) ;(
lol, xD :p )= o' o' $o.o$ (:[]) $o.o$ (:[]) o_o in (:[]) o_o :p
Cale: I plan on forming a symbiotic relationship with
sandtrout, which, as they merge with my body, will sustain me as I slowly
turn into a sandworm, and make use of my billions of other memories
and prescience to rule over everyone and everything for millenia.
quicksilver: or in Java, we'd make it more generic by using
a PolynomialDivisionOperatorFactory. roconnor: I was
going to read about laziness, but I decided to do it later, when I need
to understand it.
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: January 19, 2009

Posted 11 months ago by byorgey

Haskell Weekly News: January 19, 2009
Welcome to issue 101 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Gee whiz, people, stop being so darn ... [More] productive or you're going to burn
me out. Seriously.

Announcements curl-1.3.4. Sigbjorn
Finne
announced
that a new version of curl,
a complete Haskell binding to the libcurl API, is now available and
have been uploaded to Hackage. The most notable change is the overloading
of representation of response buffers (and headers), allowing for the
use of ByteStrings.

Turbinado V0.4. Alson Kemp
announced
the release of version 0.4 of Turbinado, an easy to use
Model-View-Controller-ish web framework for Haskell. Highlights for the
0.4 release include a dramatically improved ORM which handles foreign keys,
and improved documentation.

Hackage about to reach 1000 releases. Don Stewart
announced
that Hackage is about to reach the 1000 release
mark, 2 years after it went live. Some pretty charts can
be seen here.

leapseconds-announced-2009. Bjorn Buckwalter
announced
the release of the leapseconds-announced
package, which contains a single module and a single function implementing
the Data.Time.Clock.TAI.LeapSecondTable interface.

zipper-0.1. Andres Loeh
announced
zipper-0.1,
a library offering a generic zipper for systems of recursive datatypes.

multirec-0.2. Andres Loeh
announced
multirec-0.2,
a library which provides a mechanism to talk about fixed points of
systems of datatypes that may be mutually recursive. On top of these
representations, generic functions such as the fold or the Zipper can
then be defined.

ghci-haskeline 0.1. Judah Jacobson
announced
the first release of ghci-haskeline.
This package uses the GHC API to reimplement ghci with the Haskeline library as a
backend. Haskeline is a library for line input in command-line programs,
similar to readline or editline, which is written in Haskell and thus
(hopefully) more easily integrated into other Haskell programs.

The Monad.Reader (13) - Call for copy. Wouter Swierstra
announced
a Call for Copy for Issue 13 of The
Monad.Reader. The submission deadline is February 13, 2009. Please
get in touch with Wouter if you intend to submit something.

Cabal 2.0. Duncan Coutts
announced
that he has started a wiki page to
collect ideas for Cabal 2. The basic idea for Cabal 2 is to learn
lessons from our how the existing design has fared and how we can make
a better design to tackle an expanded set of goals.

Announcing Haskell protocol-buffers 1.4.0 (the smashing recursive
edition). Chris Kuklewicz
announced
version 1.4.0 (the smashing recursive edition) of protocol-buffers,
a Haskell interface to Google's "..language-neutral, platform-neutral,
extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications
protocols, data storage, and more."

Haskell WikiProject. Robin Green
asked:
is anyone else interested in forming a Haskell WikiProject on Wikipedia,
to collaborate on improving and maintaining the coverage and quality of
articles on Haskell-related software and topics (broadly defined)?

darcs 2.2.0. Petr Rockai
announced
the release of darcs 2.2.0, with both a source tarball and a cabalized
tarball available. This version features many improvements and bug
fixes; see Petr's original announcement for a list.

hledger 0.3. Simon Michael
announced
the release of hledger 0.3, a
partial haskell clone of John Wiegley's "ledger" text-based accounting tool.
It generates transaction and balance reports from a plain text ledger file,
and demonstrates a functional implementation of ledger.

language-sh-0.0.3.1. Stephen Hicks
announced
the language-sh
package, a set of modules for parsing, manipulating, and printing
sh-style shell scripts. It's being developed alongside shsh, the Simple Haskell Shell.

Coadjute 0.0.1, generic build tool. Matti Niemenmaa
announced
version 0.0.1 of Coadjute, a generic
build tool intended as an easier to use and more portable replacement
for make.

dataenc 0.12. Magnus Therning
announced
version 0.12 of dataenc,
a data encoding library currently providing Uuencode, Base64, Base64Url,
Base32, Base32Hex, Base16, Base85, and (new in 0.12) yEncoding.

3 applications of "indexed composition" as a language design
principle. Greg Meredith
announced
that he has found a way to generalize
the LogicT transformer, and calculated it's application
to three fairly interesting examples.

HTTPbis / HTTP-4000.x package available. Sigbjorn Finne
announced
the availability of a modernization of the venerable and trusted HTTP
package. The headline new feature of this version is the parametrization
of the representation of payloads in both HTTP requests and responses;
two new representations are supported, strict and lazy ByteStrings.

monad-interleave 0.1. Patrick Perry
announced
the monad-interleave
package, which provides a type class generalizing his two favorite
functions in Haskell, "unsafeInterleaveIO" and "unsafeInterleaveST".

hs-dotnet, version 0.3.0. Sigbjorn Finne
announced
the first
public release of hs-dotnet, a pragmatic take
on interoperating between Haskell (via GHC) and .NET.

HEADS UP: finalizer changes coming in GHC 6.10.2. Simon Marlow
announced
that, by popular demand, GHC 6.10.2 will support finalizers that are
actually guaranteed to run, and run promptly. However, there's a catch. If
you want to know what the catch is, read his message.

split-0.1.1 (doc bugfix; new functions wordsBy and linesBy). Brent
Yorgey
announced
version 0.1.1 of the split
library. This version fixes some Haddock bugs, and adds two new
convenience functions suggested by Neil Mitchell, wordsBy and linesBy.

json-0.4.1. Sigbjorn Finne
announced
a new release (0.4.1) of the json
package. New in this release is a generic JSON encoder contributed
by Lennart Augustsson along with a number of other, smaller changes.

haskell-platform mailing list. Duncan Coutts
announced
that anyone interested in helping out with the
haskell platform project is invited to subscribe to the haskell-platform
mailing list. This mailing list is for discussing practical stuff;
policy questions will be discussed on the libraries mailing list.

bytestring-trie 0.1.4. wren ng thornton
announced
version 0.1.4 of the bytestring-trie
package. This release fixes a number of bugs, adds functions such as
keys, toListBy, fromList{L,R,S}, and separated Data.Trie (the main
module for users) from Data.Trie.Internal (gritty details, and core
implementation).

HLint 1.2. Neil Mitchell
announced
HLint version 1.2,
a lint-like tool for Haskell that detects and suggests improvements for
your code. The biggest new feature is list recursion suggestions.

Working with HLint from Emacs. Alex Ott
announced
an emacs
module for integration with HLint.

Discussion An Alternative Data.List.Zipper. Jeff Wheeler
posted
an improved version of
Data.List.Zipper, and requested feedback or constructive criticism.

Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt. John Goerzen
posted
a link to a blog
post by Brian Hurt, along with some thoughts about naming things in the
standard libraries, spawning the longest ML thread in recent history.

Blog noise Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Jeff Heard: The
Docuverse.. Cool search query visualization for massive numbers
of documents.

Ben Moseley: The
Category Theory of Appendages.

Galois, Inc: Galois
at POPL.

Colin Ross: Does your
IDE define you or support you?.

Alson Kemp: ANNOUNCE:
Turbinado V0.4.

Jeff Heard: ProteinVis: Visualizing a large
tree in Haskell and OpenGL.

ezekiel smithburg: what
to do when you can't solve a problem with a hackage
library you need?.

Jeff Heard:
Simple Futures
in Haskell.

Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Haskell
Monoids and their Uses. A nice introductory
tutorial on Monoids in Haskell.

Real-World Haskell: John
Goerzen on Why You Should Learn
Haskell.

LHC Team: LLVM
is great..

Jeff Heard: iBiblio traffic, search
engine hits, and cross-traffic.

Luke Palmer: Use
MonadRandom!.

LHC Team: Why
LLVM probably won't replace C--..

Magnus
Therning: Series
of posts on testing Haskell code.

Magnus
Therning: Useful
thing when adopting test-framework after already using
HUnit.

Magnus Therning: dataenc
0.12 posted to HackageDB.

Jeff
Heard: The
new HTTP library.

Jeff Heard: Beautiful Code,
Compelling Evidence.

LHC Team: The
case against C/LLVM..

Manuel M T Chakravarty:
Some
nice code examples showing how to use type
families..

Manuel M T Chakravarty: Enforcing a relation
between independent type families..

Nick Mudge:
Zunes, Year 2038 Problem,
Real World Haskell, Why, Potion, Games.

Darcs: darcs
2.2.0 is released!.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Info
tables.

LHC Team: What
is LHC?.

LHC Team: Resources..

LHC Team: Typeclass
Blues.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Liveness
lies.

Galois, Inc: Real
World Haskell: Intel Parallel Programming
Podcast.

Real-World Haskell: Intel
Parallel Programming Podcast: Real World
Haskell.

Brent Yorgey: Abstraction,
intuition, and the "monad tutorial
fallacy".

Luke Palmer: Ha!
I can't even get Events right.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Bootstrapping
7.

Colin Ross: Finding
a member of an infinite list.

LHC Team: The
mess with variable ids..

Luke Palmer: Ridding
ourselves of IO before there is a good
replacement.

GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Bootstrapping
7.

Colin Ross: Notes
on working with finite sorted
lists.

Bryan O'Sullivan: Fun
with Haskell view patterns.

Conal Elliott: 3D
rendering as functional reactive programming.

Quotes of the Week luqui: sigh: mathematicians. can't
live with 'em, can't prove 'em wrong.
mauke: YO DAWG I HEARD YOU LIKE METACIRCULARITY SO WE PUT AN
INTERPRETER IN YOUR INTERPRETER SO YOU CAN RUN CODE WHILE YOU RUN CODE
lament: tuples are proof that haskell is inherently broken
and will never work. roconnor: [after a long -cafe
thread on the suckiness of using math terms in Haskell] we don't use
Integer anymore. Too abstract. It is now called CountingThingy.
quicksilver: partially applied type synonym = type lambdas
= unrestricted type functions = can of pants ddarius:
In the spirit of that article on monoids, we should drop the term "tree"
and replace it with the term "free pointed magma" ski_:
unique among types, 'Void -> X' has its own charm. tourists should
definitly pay a visit. pao: Cale: thanks ... I really
think you deserve a statue ... or, at least, a portrait in ascii art on
haskell.org :-) byorgey: TDD replaces a type checker
in Ruby in the same way that a strong drink replaces sorrows.
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]