ANNOUNCE: Haskell Communities and Activities Report (15th ed., November 2008)
On behalf of the many, many contributors, I am pleased to announce that the Haskell Communities and Activities Report (15th edition, November 2008) http://www.haskell.org/communities/ is now available from the Haskell Communities home page in PDF and HTML formats. Many thanks go to all the people that contributed to this report, both directly, by sending in descriptions, and indirectly, by doing all the interesting things that are reported. I hope you will find it as interesting a read as I did. If you have not encountered the Haskell Communities and Activities Reports before, you may like to know that the first of these reports was published in November 2001. Their goal is to improve the communication between the increasingly diverse groups, projects, and individuals working on, with, or inspired by Haskell. The idea behind these reports is simple: Every six months, a call goes out to all of you enjoying Haskell to contribute brief summaries of your own area of work. Many of you respond (eagerly, unprompted, and sometimes in time for the actual deadline ;-) to the call. The editor collects all the contributions into a single report and feeds that back to the community. When I try for the next update, six months from now, you might want to report on your own work, project, research area or group as well. So, please put the following into your diaries now: ---------------------------------------- End of April 2009: target deadline for contributions to the May 2009 edition of the HC&A Report ---------------------------------------- Unfortunately, many Haskellers working on interesting projects are so busy with their work that they seem to have lost the time to follow the Haskell related mailing lists and newsgroups, and have trouble even finding time to report on their work. If you are a member, user or friend of a project so burdened, please find someone willing to make time to report and ask them to "register" with the editor for a simple e-mail reminder in April (you could point me to them as well, and I can then politely ask if they want to contribute, but it might work better if you do the initial asking). Of course, they will still have to find the ten to fifteen minutes to draw up their report, but maybe we can increase our coverage of all that is going on in the community. Feel free to circulate this announcement further in order to reach people who might otherwise not see it. Enjoy! Janis Voigtlaender <hcar at haskell.org> -- Dr. Janis Voigtlaender http://wwwtcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~voigt/ mailto:voigt@tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de
Good work! It is always interesting to see the secret Haskell projects that only get announced via the HCAR. Things not on haskell@ or on hackage. For example, this under-the-radar project: http://www.haskell.org/communities/11-2008/html/report.html#sect7.7 7.7 IVU Traffic Technologies AG Rostering Group Haskell to solve constraints on EU bus timetables! In production use! -- Don voigt:
On behalf of the many, many contributors, I am pleased to announce that the
Haskell Communities and Activities Report (15th edition, November 2008)
http://www.haskell.org/communities/
is now available from the Haskell Communities home page in PDF and HTML formats.
On Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:15:30 -0800, Don Stewart
Good work!
It is always interesting to see the secret Haskell projects that only get announced via the HCAR. Things not on haskell@ or on hackage.
For example, this under-the-radar project:
http://www.haskell.org/communities/11-2008/html/report.html#sect7.7
7.7 IVU Traffic Technologies AG Rostering Group
Haskell to solve constraints on EU bus timetables! In production use!
Speaking of production use, one type of project that would be interesting would be a study examining how Haskell can increase programmer productivity for production use for programmers who are not necessarily gifted in programming, but whose forte may lie in another field and who are very interested in functional programming; i.e., some type of tabulated data (preferably a graph, although a table would work, too) of data quantifying how useful Haskell is in allowing one whose forte may not necessarily be in programming (say, a physicist, mathematician, or even a translator who happens to have an algorithmically-focused computer science degree) to equal or excel the productivity of, say, a gifted C/C++ programmer in, say, setting up a commercial Web site. The reason is that recently, there has been news of people in academia leaving for other realms because of worsening conditions (see "As strikes begin, lecturer quits to become plumber" at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/feb/24/lecturerspay.highereducation, and "Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University" at http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm). Up to know, my dream was to publish a paper on type theory to motivate study of Haskell, but now it looks like I may need to aim for creating a commercial Web site. However, I am not sure of being able to compete with commercial Web sites, because I am more of a writer/translator who happens to like functional programming than a real-life programmer. I've already seen such articles as "Why Functional Programming Matters" (see http://www.md.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html), "Why Haskell Matters" (see http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Why_Haskell_matters), and "Beating the Averages" (see http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html). However, these essays tend to focus on how a functional language FL is structurally better than non-functional languages NFL in general, without specifying the skill-level of the programmer. Instead, it would be interesting to find the minimum skill-level s necessary for, say, somebody whose forte is not in programming, but who, say, studies functional programming as a hobby, to use Haskell as a tool in achieving a productivity level equivalent to that of a gifted C/C++ programmer. To sum: Can a theoretically-minded Haskell student who studies Haskell out of interest in type theory compete with star C/C++ programmers in developing, say, commercial Web sites? This is not quite clear, because even if Haskell can increase programmer productivity by tenfold, a star programmer can also be more productive than an average programmer by tenfold. How risky is this challenge? -- Benjamin L. Russell
-- Don
voigt:
On behalf of the many, many contributors, I am pleased to announce that the
Haskell Communities and Activities Report (15th edition, November 2008)
http://www.haskell.org/communities/
is now available from the Haskell Communities home page in PDF and HTML formats.
-- Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^
participants (3)
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Benjamin L.Russell -
Don Stewart -
Janis Voigtlaender