[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 119 - May 23, 2009

23 May 2009

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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090523
Issue 119 - May 23, 2009
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   Welcome to issue 119 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

Announcements

   GHC porting works again. Ian Lynagh [2]announced that the
   [3]instructions for porting GHC to a new architecture now work again
   with the HEAD. If you get stuck when trying to do a port, feel free to
   ask on cvs-ghc at haskell.org or in #ghc on freenode.

   6.10.4 plans. Ian Lynagh [4]announced plans for a 6.10.4 bugfix release
   of GHC. If you know of any bugs that you think should be looked into
   for 6.10.4, please let the development team know.

   The Timber compiler 1.0.3. Johan Nordlander [5]announced the release of
   version 1.0.3 of the Timber compiler. Timber is a modern language for
   building event-driven systems, based around the notion of reactive
   objects. It is also a purely functional language derived from Haskell,
   although with a strict evaluation semantics. 1.0.3 is a bug fix
   release, paving the way for future feature releases.

   mathlink-2.0.0.3. Tracy Wadleigh [6]announced the release of
   [7]mathlink, a library for writing Mathematica packages in Haskell. One
   simply writes some functions of type (MLGet a, MLPut b) => a -> IO b
   and provides a package specification in a simple DSL; the result is a
   program that exposes functions that can be called from Mathematica.

   text 0.2, fast and comprehensive Unicode support using stream fusion.
   Bryan O'Sullivan [8]announced the availability of [9]text 0.2, an
   efficient Unicode text library that uses stream fusion. New and notable
   in this release is support for lazy, chunked text, so you can process
   text files far larger than memory using a small footprint.

   Haskell Hackathon in Philadelphia. Brent Yorgey [10]announced Hac phi,
   a Haskell hackathon to be held in Philadelphia in July. Check out the
   [11]wiki page and add your name if you are interested in attending!
   More details to follow soon.

   feed2twitter 0.2 & hackage2twitter 0.2.1. Tom Lokhorst [12]announced
   the first release of [13]feed2twitter, a library for sending posts from
   a news feed to Twitter.

   EsotericBot 0.0.1. spoon [14]announced the release of [15]Esotericbot,
   a sophisticated, lightweight IRC bot, written in Haskell.

   atom 0.0.4. Tom Hawkins [16]announced a new release of [17]atom; this
   version adds an array datatype (A a).

   Hieroglyph-2.21 and buster, buster-gtk, and buster-network-2.0. Jeff
   Heard [18]announced new releases of [19]Hieroglyph, [20]buster,
   [21]buster-gtk, and [22]buster-network, with tons of changes; read
   Jeff's original announcement for details.

   TxtSushi 0.1. Keith Sheppard [23]announced the first version of
   [24]TxtSushi, a collection of command line utilities for processing
   tab-delimited and CSV files. It includes a utility for doing SQL
   SELECTs on flat files.

Discussion

   Should exhaustiveness testing be on by default? Don Stewart started a
   [25]discussion, prompted by a [26]recent blog post, on whether coverage
   checking should be on by default, and other issues relating to compiler
   warnings and coding style.

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

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

   Haskell in 3 Slides. John Van Enk [29]asked for ideas on a 3 to 4 slide
   introduction to Haskell. What do YOU think should be on those slides?

Blog noise

   [30]Haskell news from the [31]blogosphere. Blog posts from people new
   to the Haskell community are marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them!
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [32]Streaming Unicode support for Haskell: text
       0.2.
     * Alex McLean: [33]Haskell hack. Music generation in Haskell.
     * Well-Typed.Com: [34]Building plugins as Haskell shared libs. A
       sneak preview of building Haskell shared libraries on Linux.
     * LHC Team: [35]New release: LHC 0.8.
     * Mark Wassell: [36]Grapefruit And Glade.
     * Conal Elliott: [37]The C language is purely functional.
     * >>> Will Donnelly: [38]Haskell: A Pretty Nice Language.
     * FP-Syd: [39]Sydney FP Group: FP-Syd #14..
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [40]Trace Diagrams with Monads.

Quotes of the Week

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

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [41]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [42]the Haskell Sequence and [43]Planet Haskell. [44]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [45]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [46]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [47]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/16984
   3. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Porting
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/16972
   5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17200
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17197
   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/mathlink
   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58862
   9. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/text
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58817
  11. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hac_%CF%86
  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58801
  13. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/feed2twitter
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58796
  15. http://www.killersmurf.com/projects/esotericbot
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58752
  17. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/atom
  18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58683
  19. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Hieroglyph
  20. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/buster
  21. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/buster-gtk
  22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/buster%2Dnetwork
  23. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58635
  24. http://www.keithsheppard.name/txt-sushi
  25. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/16926
  26. http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/64
  27. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/11145
  28. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58784
  29. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58664
  30. http://planet.haskell.org/
  31. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  32. http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2009/05/22/streaming-unicode-support-for-hask...
  33. http://yaxu.org/haskell-hack/
  34. http://blog.well-typed.com/2009/05/buildings-plugins-as-haskell-shared-libs/
  35. http://lhc-compiler.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-release-lhc-08.html
  36. http://www.poundstone.org/blog/?p=231
  37. http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functional/
  38. http://willdonnelly.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/haskell-a-pretty-nice-language/
  39. http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/FP-Syd/fp-syd-14.html
  40. http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/05/trace-diagrams-with-monads.html
  41. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  42. http://sequence.complete.org/
  43. http://planet.haskell.org/
  44. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  45. http://haskell.org/
  46. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  47. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/