Top picks:

• Gabriel Gonzalez evaluates Haskell in the style of a State-of-the-Union address. He rates Haskell from Immature to Mature to Best-in-class under 28 headings, the first four being Compilers, Server-side web programming, Scripting / Command-line applications, and Numerical programming. He also recommends libraries and tutorials under each heading. Reverberations on Hacker News and /r/haskell.
  
  
• Challenged over claims of FP productivity improvement, Douglas M. Auclair rattles off success stories from his previous work at various subsidiaries of the US Federal Gov fending for the taxpayer to the tune of billions of dollars. Nibbles of interest on Hacker News.
  
  
• Aaron Wolf goes from zero programming directly to Haskell and writes of his experience. His favorite learning resource is the Haskell Wikibook, which he can improve as he reads. He is co-founder of Snowdrift.coop, a crowdfunding platform for freely-licensed works. The Haskell Reddit finds Aaron's testimony a change from the "Haskell is too hard for me" meme.
  
  
• The season of introspection continues. On the heels of Hu, Hughes, and Wang on "How Functional Programming Mattered" (see previous HWN); Michael Green, Kathleen Fisher, and David Walker track the ebb and flow of research topics in the conference proceedings of the Big Four: Principles of PL (POPL), PL Design and Implementation (PLDI), International Conference on FP (ICFP); and OOP, Systems, Languages, Apps (OOPSLA). No mention of Haskell but if you're looking for a brief history of PL research -- the slides are even more succinct -- this is the only data-driven survey you'll find.
  
  
• Doug Beardsley reminds us that date-based version inference cannot replace the role of explicit version upper bounds. The reason? The package developer might not be using the latest version of its dependencies on the day they publish the work. Also, among the 72 comments of the /r/haskell convo, Doug observes that Stackage over-conservatively locks to a single version, whereas community-wide adherence to the Package Versioning Policy (PVP) of original hackage yields seamless delivery of bugfixes and improvements.
  
  
• In less than a week, Xmonad will lose its issue tracking system. On Aug 24, Google Code goes read-only. Community heroes Brandon Allbery and Daniel Wagner work at grabbing a backup of the issues. Still no consensus over what and where to migrate to.
  
  
• Mark Dominus delves into the bits and bytes of the 1999 Cosmic Call attempt by astrophysicists to contact aliens. He shows the visual bitmaps transmitted into space. Brent Yorgey writes to say he enjoys the 23-part series interspersed with little puzzles.
  
  

Quotes of the Week:

• Doug McIlroy: Conditional compilation is admitting defeat.
  
  
• /u/kamatsu: I feel like the reason people find Haskell an eye-opening experience is because their CS education was deficient.
  
  
• @wfaler: Is there a club to join when you silently sob at having to give your Monad Transformers Monad Transformers? Sounds a lot like #EnterpriseFP