Top Picks:

• Andrew Gibiansky announces the Mathematica-inspired REPL 2.0 IHaskell as a web-app you can play with right now. Bouquets include: "This is an awesome step up from the tryhaskell window." Also, "I love IHaskell. I've already started preferring it to ghci since it's so much easier to use." More /r/haskell love here.
  
  
• Mihai Maruseac and Alejandro Serrano Mena publish the 28th Haskell Communities and Activities Report. Top comment on HN: "Haskell is backed by a truly amazing community. Haskell will continue to inspire people to build better, safer software. I hope that the values of tolerance, respect and benevolence that most of the Haskell community is supporting will also contribute to make tech a more friendly and equal place for everyone."
  
  
• Bicycling in circles just to find parking in Utrecht? Bas van Dijk launches a city-wide monitoring system that guides you to a space that's free, dry, and safe. Written in Haskell 'natch, even the front-end leverages GHCJS. Devops'ed in NixOS. He tips off his fellow redditors about using blaze-react to wrap Facebook's React library. HN-worthy.
  
  
• Announcing on haskell-cafe and /r/haskell, Sean Seefried open sources a Docker script that instantly gets you a Haskell build environment for Android game development. No more fiddling with cross-compiles. He even gives you an open source game all mobile-ready. Thanks, Sean!
  
  
• Vincent Hanquez releases cryptonite, a single package that consolidates 10-20 other crypto packages. Why? Because maintaining multiple packages is a pain involving fiddling with dependency version bounds and changelog/cabal/version metadata. Benefit for the user? Easier discovery of crypto widgets now that they are all in one haddock, as opposed to hidden in a package whose name eludes you. Kibbitz on /r/haskell.
  
  
• Joe Nelson discovered Haskell two years ago and calls it "moon language." Now he works full-time at Wagon, an all-Haskell start-up offering "a modern data collaboration tool." He's proud of his team that "excels at debugging gnarly issues, including a memory leak caused by a useful yet tricky language feature called lazy evaluation." But what's the buzz that HN and /r/haskell latch on? Answer: The pros and cons of effectful point-free refactoring.
  
  
• Fredrik Olsen migrates from Ruby on Rails (RoR) to Haskell at fintech start-up Bdellium. Unlike RoR where he "always had a much harder time" with an existing codebase, he testifies that "Haskell let me quickly browse the code, read the types and almost instantly understand the structure and layout of the program."
  
  Hiring for RoR nets him "a few hundred applications" where only "10–20% I’d say are people that I’d actually be interested in hiring." Hiring for Haskell gets "50 responses to the Reddit post, all of them were people that I could have hired. Many of the applicants were even grossly over-qualified and were willing to take the job just because it would let them work in Haskell." Ben Ford of Fynder.io corroborates Fredrik in the top comment on /r/haskell.
  
  Phil Wadler reblogs the story and zooms in on how Fredrik gained 3.7x parallelism from 4 cores by merely tweaking a single line of code. Control.Parallel.Strategies ftw!
  
  
• Arnaud Bailly shares on HN that he had "no issue finding talent" for Haskell jobs in Singapore. "150 qualified applicants (i.e. passed the test, which was to design an inventory management system in Haskell) for ~10 positions, all foreign; the majority came from the US, Germany and Scandinavia."
  
  
• If type errors can be deferred, why not also "name not found"? Tom Ellis asks. He thinks it would make Haskell "gentler for newcomers." For veterans: even more stub-driven-dev opportunities. Coincidentally, Dan Burton spitballed the same on /r/haskell. This idea has a history stretching back at least 3 years: see trac ticket #5910.
  
  
• David Luposchainsky proposes to move the fail method out of the Monad type class. With the deeply thought out blueprint he provides, /r/haskell reports that the community's already working on it. Discussion on libraries list.
  
  
• Anthony Cowley proposes a shorter syntax for imports on haskell-cafe and trac. He withdraws his proposal five days later because the "disdainful mockery" and "strongly worded rebuttals" have him overwhelmed on what is only a "nights and weekends project." Reddit discussion here.
  
  
• Henk-Jan van Tuyl runs smack into a library .a-extension File Not Found problem when installing data-default-instances-old-locale on 7.10. Culprit? Windows! And its %&@#! 255-character filepath limit. He is not alone. Why is 7.8 ok? Because package names in the filepath used to be abbreviated. Workaround? Instead of cabal install X, download it first: cabal get X, then cabal install ./X. Thanks to Matej Borovec and Michal Antkiewicz for sorting it out.
  
  
• FP Complete announces Stack, a replacement for cabal-install the command-line tool (not Cabal the library infrastructure). Stack leverages Stackage Long-Term Support (LTS) releases for a speedy escape from cabal hell. Warmly received on /r/haskell. Dan Burton blogs on how Stack eases development by removing the need to remember a sequence of cabal commands. HN-worthy and a troll that Haskell's "an esoteric language that no one uses" provokes many a valiant, evidence-backed defense.
  
  
• Redditor beerdude26 nudges folks on /r/haskell to continue cultivating the haskell wiki. He sets an example by splicing in the common newtype workaround into the entry on orphan instances.
  
  
• In HN news: Cloud Haskell -- Erlang-style concurrent and distributed programming. Top comment notes that whereas the web site suggests that activity stopped in 2014, CH actually thrives on Github.
  
  
• In HN news: Haskell wiki entry on Frag, a 2005 undergrad project by Mun Hon Cheong who recreated a Quake3-like First-Person Shooter (FPS) game using Yampa FRP. Although a decade old, Cody Goodman reports that he's gotten it to compile.
  
  
• In HN news: APL lives! A functional programmer investigates APL, discovers that it "looks every bit as mind-bending and unbe­liev­able as scenes from Johnny Depp’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", and summarizes the syntax for the benefit of all.
  
  

Quotes of the Week:

• A typeclass with only one instance is nonsensical, and often a symptom of trying to use typeclasses as OO classes. -- Brandon Allbery
  
  
• That Haskell shows the developer things about themselves even they didn't know is enough to make it worth learning. It's mind-bending and ideology-exposing. -- Redditor on /r/haskell
  
  
• Haskell's great for writing an ugly solution and fixing it later because refactoring is so cheap.  No need to get it right the first time. -- Gabriel Gonzalez on Twitter
  
  

-- Kim-Ee