Welcome to issue 158 of the HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community in the week of October 31 - November 06. I'd like to start things off with a quote from Jeremy O'Donoghue this past week on a thread that produced plenty of laughs: Haskell was developed by Isaac Newton in the 15th Century as a tool to help his investigations into the Alchemic arts. It was rediscovered in the 1980s by three Cambridge undergraduates who were browsing through Newton's laboratory notebooks looking for smutty jokes in the margins, and has since developed into an elaborate joke perpetrated by elite computer scientists who believe that predictable order of execution is contrary to natural law. The current version of Haskell is Haskell 1714, which adds syntactic sugar for Zygohistomorphic Premorphisms to the original language definition of 1693. This week we had 378 messages posted to Haskell-Cafe (up 76 from last week!), 30 stories posted to Reddit (1 more than last week), 40 questions posted to StackOverflow (15 more than last week), and 96 updates to Hackage (11 more than last week). Busy busy week! From all the noise in the intertubes, it sounds like BelHac was awesome. There were plenty of kudos to Jasper Van der Jeugt for how well things went. Jasper posted a [2]summary blog, and we also have some [3]pictures from the event. Announcements Will Sonnex [4]updated Zeno, a fully automated inductive theorem proving tool for Haskell programs. Gregory D. Weber [5]updated Sifflet, a visual, functional programming language and support system for students learning about recursion. Mario BlaževiÄ/= [6]updated monad-coroutine and SCC to version 0.6. The monad-coroutine package exports a generic monad transformer: Coroutine: Functor s => MonadTrans (Coroutine s). Johan Tibell informed us that he has [7]merged network-bytestring into the network package. This means that efficient and correct networking using ByteString is available as part of the standard network package. By far, the most popular thread this week in -cafe was a thread entitled [8]"Haskell is a scripting language inspired by Python." As you can imagine, many could not resist! The thread diverted into some interesting historical notes about Haskell. Top Reddit Stories * Learn You a Haskell: Zippers Domain: learnyouahaskell.com Score: 91, Comments: 44 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e0qqz/learn_you_a_haskell_zippers/ Original: http://learnyouahaskell.com/zippers * Neat Haskell commenting trick Domain: self.haskell Score: 78, Comments: 6 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/dyvsi/neat_haskell_commenting_trick... Original: /r/haskell/comments/dyvsi/neat_haskell_commenting_trick/ * Haskell Halloween! Domain: i.imgur.com Score: 53, Comments: 5 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/dyznc/haskell_halloween/ Original: http://i.imgur.com/t7qWf.jpg * Circular wavefronts Domain: claudiusmaximus.goto10.org Score: 39, Comments: 3 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e02vp/circular_wavefronts/ Original: http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org/cm/2010-11-02_circular_wavefronts.html * Optimizing Haskell Loops With LLVM Domain: dmpots.com Score: 35, Comments: 1 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e1yfn/optimizing_haskell_loops_with... Original: http://www.dmpots.com/blog/2010/11/05/optimizing-haskell-loops-with-llvm.htm... * Obtaining the name of a function in Haskell Domain: mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com Score: 24, Comments: 3 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e1i3q/obtaining_the_name_of_a_funct... Original: http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2010/11/obtaining-name-of-functio... * Generative Type Abstraction and Type-level Computation Domain: cis.upenn.edu Score: 17, Comments: 2 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/dzx80/generative_type_abstraction_a... Original: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sweirich/newtypes.pdf * Relations rather than functions - where to learn about them? Domain: self.haskell Score: 17, Comments: 17 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e1520/relations_rather_than_functio... Original: /r/haskell/comments/e1520/relations_rather_than_functions_where_to_learn/ * Haskellers.com: Special Interest Groups feature active Domain: haskellers.com Score: 16, Comments: 2 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/dzkel/haskellerscom_special_interes... Original: http://www.haskellers.com/news/6/ * The Utrecht Haskell Compiler now in github Domain: github.com Score: 16, Comments: 2 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e26ar/the_utrecht_haskell_compiler_... Original: https://github.com/uhc/uhc Top StackOverflow Questions * how to do this in haskell? Question (votes: 0, answers: 1): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4106247/how-to-do-this-in-haskell * Haskell define Merge using mapReduce Question (votes: 0, answers: 1): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4099627/haskell-define-merge-using-mapred... * Real GHC RTS memory usage Question (votes: 0, answers: 1): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4088351/real-ghc-rts-memory-usage * reading file and accessing in haskell (functional programming language) Question (votes: 0, answers: 2): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4074342/reading-file-and-accessing-in-has... * Converting tree types Question (votes: 0, answers: 2): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4073091/converting-tree-types * Printing Binary Tree per Layer in a List Question (votes: 0, answers: 3): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4068681/printing-binary-tree-per-layer-in... * Comparing Bool Value in Matrix Question (votes: 0, answers: 2): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4063553/comparing-bool-value-in-matrix * Converting Int to Integer Question (votes: 0, answers: 3): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4061777/converting-int-to-integer * Integrating Haskell with .Net? Question (votes: 1, answers: 3): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4111467/integrating-haskell-with-net * Putting existentials into monad Question (votes: 1, answers: 1): Read on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4106793/putting-existentials-into-monad Quotes of the week * Luke Palmer:Also they "don't scale well", which I guess means that they don't make it inconvenient to design badly. * merijn: <dankna> someday we'll need meta-software that converts from obsolete languages into modern ones <merijn> Don't we call that compilers? * dolio: Let's spawn a thread every time we want to and two booleans. * ray: how about a language where you program with unit vectors: orientation oriented programming * Axman6: Haskell is easy, you just apply functions to arguments, and then you apply them to other arguments. Axman6's girlfriend: I don't like conflict * monochrom: in soviet haskell, functions run you * geheimdienst: in soviet russia, i remember lambdabot's quotes * Funktorsalat: sum is just the free monoid functor applied to the mediating arrow of the terminality of () * geheimdienst: ah, yes. now we have to make a lambdacat captioned "kittehs no bery gud at speling. we says leksah fur lexer and monad fur moniod in catagory of ennobunktors" * Vanadium: That tripped my C++ highlight. * jmcarthur: what you just typed isn't even well typed About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [9]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [10]the Haskell Sequence and [11]Planet Haskell. [12]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [13]haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please send stories to dstcruz * at * gmail * dot * com. The code used to produce this version of the newsletter is not yet publicly available, as it is a complete hack designed to get things started again. Until next time, Daniel Santa Cruz References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://jaspervdj.be/posts/2010-11-09-belhac-summary.html 3. http://www.flickr.com/groups/1566670@N23/ 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/18277 5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/18279 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/18281 7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/82798 8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/82995 9. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 10. http://sequence.complete.org/ 11. http://planet.haskell.org/ 12. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 13. http://haskell.org/