[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 110 - March 21, 2009

21 Mar 2009

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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090321
Issue 110 - March 21, 2009
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   Welcome to issue 110 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   [2]Facebook apps with Happstack, [3]Sudoku with Cryptol, what next?
   Tic-tac-toe with darcs? Anyway, lots of neat stuff this week, including
   new releases of [4]GHC, [5]jhc, and the [6]Monad.Reader, some [7]fun
   [8]visualizations, and more. Also, students: apply to work on a
   [9]Haskell project for the Google Summer of Code!

Announcements

   GHC 6.10.2 Release Candidate 1. Ian Lynagh [10]announced the [11]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 [12]announced the release of
   [13]jhc 0.6.0.

   Safe Lazy IO in Haskell. Nicolas Pouillard [14]announced the
   [15]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
   [16]announced [17]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 [18]announced the availability
   of the [19]random-shuffle package, which is based on [20]Oleg's
   description.

   random-stream package. Manlio Perillo [21]announced the
   [22]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 [23]announced the [24]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 [25]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 [26]announced the release of
   [27]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 [28]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 [29]announced the release of [30]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 [31]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 [32]announced that a new issue
   of [33]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 [34]announced the release of
   [35]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 [36]discussion on
   the relative status of the 'transformers' and 'mtl' packages.

   least fixed points above something. Jens Blanck [37]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 [38]requested feedback on
   a proposed module collecting utilities for working with type equality
   proofs.

   What unsafeInterleaveIO is unsafe. Yusaku Hashimoto began a
   [39]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 [40]announced that funding is available for a
   [41]postgraduate project to study how students learn Haskell, based on
   the wealth of data collected through the instrumented version of the
   [42]Helium system for Haskell. The project will be supervised by Simon
   Thompson and Sally Fincher, in collaboration with Jurriaan Hage,
   Utrecht University.

Blog noise

   [43]Haskell news from the [44]blogosphere.
     * Neil Mitchell: [45]Concise Generic Queries. Neil compares solving a
       query problem with several different generic programming libraries.
     * Jeff Heard: [46]Preview: Data Waves. A neat new type of data
       visualization, built using Hieroglyph.
     * >>> necrobious: [47]A fun example of Haskell's newtype.
     * GHC / OpenSPARC Project: [48]Peak issue rate is 18.64 Gig
       instrs/sec.
     * happstack.com: [49]Jeremy Shaw creates first Facebook App with
       Happstack.
     * GHC / OpenSPARC Project: [50]Peak performance.
     * Galois, Inc: [51]Solving Sudoku Using Cryptol.
     * Xmonad: [52]xmonad on ubuntu. A tutorial on getting started with
       xmonad on Ubuntu.
     * Don Stewart (dons): [53]Visualising the Haskell Universe. Pretty
       dependency graphs of ten thousand Haskell modules!
     * >>> Sean Chapel: [54]Haskell.
     * >>> Dean Berris: [55]The Haskell Experiment: HaskellDB, HTTP, and
       Monads.
     * Holumbus: [56]Hayoo! Update. The Hayoo! package index has been
       updated to include everything currently on Hackage!
     * >>> John Wiegley: [57]Journey into Haskell, Part 1. John ventures
       down the rabbit hole.
     * Bjorn Buckwalter: [58]Blogging with Pandoc, literate Haskell, and a
       bug.
     * Bjorn Buckwalter: [59]Extended sessions with the Haskell Curl
       bindings.
     * Brent Yorgey: [60]Monad.Reader #13 is out!.
     * Manuel M T Chakravarty: [61]Final version of "GPU Kernels as
       Data-Parallel Array Computations in Haskell"..
     * Xmonad: [62]Visualising xmonad.
     * Darcs: [63]darcs weekly news #21.
     * mightybyte: [64]Transactional Integrity Problem.
     * >>> Dean Berris: [65]The Haskell Experiment: Learning a New
       Programming Language.
     * >>> John Wiegley: [66]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 [67]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [68]the Haskell Sequence and [69]Planet Haskell. [70]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [71]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [72]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [73]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
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   3. http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/03/18/solving-sudoku-using-cryptol/
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/16506
   5. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2009-March/021116.html
   6. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_Monad.Reader
   7. http://vis.renci.org/jeff/2009/03/20/preview-data-waves/
   8. http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/visualising-the-haskell-universe/
   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55109
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/16506
  11. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.10.2-rc1/
  12. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2009-March/021116.html
  13. http://repetae.net/computer/jhc/
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16977
  15. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/safe%2Dlazy%2Dio
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16976
  17. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/game%2Dtree
  18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55159
  19. http://haskell.mperillo.ath.cx/random-shuffle-0.0.2.tar.gz
  20. http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/perfect-shuffle.txt
  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55143
  22. http://haskell.mperillo.ath.cx/random-stream-0.0.1.tar.gz
  23. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55116
  24. http://projects.haskell.org/language-python/
  25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55109
  26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55073
  27. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/regex%2Dtdfa
  28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55036
  29. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54959
  30. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/libffi
  31. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54958
  32. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54880
  33. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_Monad.Reader
  34. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54835
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  37. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55132
  38. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54946
  39. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54840
  40. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16967
  41. http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/research/pg/
  42. http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/Helium
  43. http://planet.haskell.org/
  44. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
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  46. http://vis.renci.org/jeff/2009/03/20/preview-data-waves/
  47. http://necrobious.blogspot.com/2009/03/fun-example-of-haskells-newtype.html
  48. http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2009/03/peak-issue-rate-is-1864-gig-instrssec.h...
  49. http://blog.happstack.com/2009/03/18/jeremy-shaw-creates-first-facebook-app-...
  50. http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2009/03/peak-performance.html
  51. http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/03/18/solving-sudoku-using-cryptol/
  52. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/xmonad-on-ubuntu/
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  56. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/blog/?p=19
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  60. http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/monadreader-13-is-out/
  61. http://justtesting.org/post/86905420
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  63. http://blog.darcs.net/2009/03/darcs-weekly-news-21.html
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  65. http://www.deanberris.com/mental-blabberings/2009/3/14/the-haskell-experimen...
  66. http://www.newartisans.com/2009/03/hello-haskell-goodbye-lisp.html
  67. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  68. http://sequence.complete.org/
  69. http://planet.haskell.org/
  70. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  71. http://haskell.org/
  72. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  73. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/