[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 77 - July 16, 2008

16 Jul 2008

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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080716
Issue 77 - July 16, 2008
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   Welcome to issue 77 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

Announcements

   Takusen 0.8.3. Alistair Bayley [2]announced the release of [3]Takusen
   0.8.3, with ODBC support, more Cabal improvements, bug fixes, and some
   basic result-set validation.

   Launching Haskell Group in Vancouver, Canada. Jon Strait [4]announced
   that a [5]Haskell Programmers Group has been created in Vancouver; the
   first meeting is scheduled for next Monday, July 21st. Feel free to
   join the Google Groups list to be notified of future events, or just
   show up to a meeting to bounce ideas and questions off of other Haskell
   programmers.

   Sphinx full-text searching client on Hackage. Chris Eidhof [6]announced
   work on a [7]client for the [8]sphinx full-text search engine. Help
   hacking on it, testing it or improving documentation is welcome.

   haskell-src-exts 0.3.5. Niklas Broberg [9]announced that the
   [10]haskell-src-exts package is now updated to understand the current
   version of Template Haskell syntax. Bug reports welcome.

   Prime time for Haskell. Janis Voigtlaender [11]announced that Haskell
   STM is featured in an [12]article in this month's Communications of the
   ACM.

   vector 0.1 (efficient arrays with lots of fusion). Roman Leshchinskiy
   [13]announced an initial release of the [14]vector library, which will
   eventually provide fast, Int-indexed arrays with a powerful fusion
   framework.

   Galois Tech Talks: Stream Fusion for Haskell Arrays. Don Stewart
   [15]announced that he was giving this week's Galois Tech Talk, on
   stream fusion for Haskell arrays. The talk was yesterday, July 15, but
   hopefully some sort of recording or slides will be made available.

   protocol-buffers. Chris Kuklewicz [16]announced a very early version of
   the [17]protocol-buffers package, a Haskell interface to Google's newly
   released [18]data interchange format.

   GHC IRC meeting. Simon Marlow [19]announced the (first weekly?) IRC
   meeting to discuss GHC, a scheduled time when the developers turn up on
   #ghc, discuss current topics around GHC, and users can chime in with
   questions, points for discussion, complaints and so on. The first
   meeting took place on July 16 at 1600 BST (UTC +1)/0800 PDT
   (UTC-7)/1100 EDT (UTC-4), in the #ghc channel on chat.freenode.net;
   hopefully this will become a weekly event.

Google Summer of Code

   Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [20]Google Summer of
   Code.

   GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on [21]improvements to
   the GHC API. He recently [22]asked for comments on a proposed
   refactoring to the GHC API, creating a new Ghc monad to capture error
   handling and single-threaded use of Sessions.

   GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins
   for GHC. [23]This week, he wrote a ton of Haddock documentation for GHC
   internals. He also added the ability for compiler plugins to generate
   their own source annotations, to allow plugins to use intermediate
   results from previous plugins. He's currently working on an exciting,
   secret feature: tune in next week to find out what it is!

   Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps
   using generalized tries. Jamie is [24]currently working on, tweaking
   the [25]api, writing tests and writing reference implementations on
   sorted and unsorted association lists.

   Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on [26]Hoogle 4. [27]This
   week, he worked on type search and database generation. Next week he
   plans to finish up type search and release and command-line version.

   Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is [28]working on Language.C, a
   standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99.

   DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a
   [29]physics engine using [30]Data Parallel Haskell.

   Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a
   [31]make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal.

Libraries

   Proposals and extensions to the [32]standard libraries.

   adding split to Data.List. Gwern Branwen [33]proposed adding some
   split-like functions to Data.List. Will they actually get added this
   time? Will people be able to agree on one of the seventeen possible
   sets of semantics? Tune in next time...

Discussion

   GHC API: monad and error handling. Thomas Schilling [34]asked for
   comments on a proposed refactoring to the GHC API, creating a new Ghc
   monad to capture error handling and single-threaded use of Sessions.

Jobs

   Research positions on Modeling and Analyzing Software Adaptation,
   University of Koblenz. Ralf Lammel [35]announced two research positions
   for a postdoc and a PhD student, available initially for 2 years. The
   successful applicants will work on the research theme of "ADAPT:
   Modeling and Analyzing Software Adaptation". The objective of [36]ADAPT
   is to relate, advance, combine, and challenge adaptation methods and
   associated methods of modeling and analyzing that are used by the
   communities of software engineering, programming languages, logic-based
   modeling, multi-agent systems, formal methods, SOA, web systems, and
   mobile, autonomous systems.

Blog noise

   [37]Haskell news from the [38]blogosphere.
     * Real-World Haskell: [39]Real World Haskellers at OSCON next week.
       John Goerzen and Bryan O'Sullivan will be in Portland, Oregon next
       week for OSCON (along with Don Stewart, who lives in Portland).
     * Russell O'Connor: [40]ICFP 2008 Post-Mortem.
     * Brent Yorgey: [41]Call for an ICFP Mars Server. Will someone make a
       Mars Server where we can all submit our rovers and new maps, watch
       them compete, improve them, and generally have fun getting some
       feedback without bugging the organizing committee? Pretty please?
     * Jamie Brandon: [42]Week 5 progress. An update on Jamie's Google
       Summer of Code project.
     * Brent Yorgey: [43]ICFP programming contest reflections.
     * >>> Chris Bogart: [44]Help with study of functional programmers.
       Chris is doing a study as part of a research internship at
       Microsoft, and is seeking people currently working on a real
       project in a functional language whom he can observe as part of his
       study.
     * >>> eigenclass: [45]Quicksort erratum. A time and space analysis of
       a classic quicksort implementation in Haskell.
     * Ralf Lammel: [46]Research positions on Modeling and Analyzing
       Software Adaptation, University of Koblenz.
     * Max Bolingbroke: [47]Compiler Plugins For GHC: Week Five. An update
       on Max's Google Summer of Code project.
     * Luke Plant: [48]Haskell Blog Rewrite - Session 7. Luke documents
       setting up CentOS in VirtualBox VM in order to compile Haskell code
       for a server to which he does not have ssh access. Not for the
       faint of heart.
     * Chris Eidhof: [49]Stemming with Haskell. A [50]stemming library and
       [51]Sphinx client for Haskell.
     * >>> Duane Johnson: [52]Haskell is Popular on IRC. The large amount
       of community participation and academic brainshare gives Duane a
       lot of confidence in Haskell.
     * >>> Mike Harris: [53]ICFP Programming Contest '08. Mike
       participated in the ICFP programming contest, and might try porting
       his solution to Haskell.
     * Luke Palmer: [54]The Curry-Howard isomorphism and the duality of x
       and ->.
     * Magnus Therning: [55]Playing with prefixes. Magnus explores
       different ways to encode units of storage (bytes, kilobytes,
       kibibytes...) in Haskell.
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [56]MSFP 2008.
     * Shin-Cheng Mu: [57]Tail-Recursive, Linear-Time Fibonacci.
     * Neil Mitchell: [58]GSoC Hoogle: Week 7.
     * FP Lunch: [59]CCC-ness of the category of containers.
     * JP Moresmau: [60]instance Data Map where -- half done!. JP writes
       an Data.Generics.Data instance for Data.Map.
     * >>> Rick Carback: [61]AutoKey in Haskell. Rick is learning Haskell
       and has implemented a simple AutoKey cipher.
     * >>> Jeremy Frens: [62]PE Problem #2 in All Languages (Part II).
     * Luke Palmer: [63]Required Optimization. Annotations for specifying
       expected compiler optimizations?
     * London Haskell Users Group: [64]AngloHaskell 2008.
     * >>> Justus: [65]random programming. Solving a simple programming
       challenge in Haskell.

Quotes of the Week

     * Japsu: segfault cat is watching you unsafeCoerce
     * z0MB13: who can say hello to me as a md5 or decipher what kind of
       technique can be used to remove the password
     * denq: [upon experiencing a moment of enlightenment] oh! something
       bing in my brain :)
     * Pseudonym: Pseudonym needs codependent types - useful when you're
       doing dysfunctional programming.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [66]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [67]the Haskell Sequence and [68]Planet Haskell. [69]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [70]haskell.org. Headlines are
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   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [72]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas
   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/
   2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9570
   3. http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/Takusen/0.8.3/Takusen-0.8.3.tar....
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42287
   5. http://groups.google.com/group/hugvan
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42263
   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/sphinx
   8. http://www.sphinxsearch.com/
   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42233
  10. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskell-src-exts
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42227
  12. http://research.microsoft.com/~larus/Papers/p80-larus.pdf
  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42207
  14. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/vector
  15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42196
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9575
  17. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/protocol-buffers
  18. http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html
  19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/14741
  20. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008
  21. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApiStatus
  22. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9589
  23. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/?p=69
  24. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-5-progress.html
  25. http://code.haskell.org/gmap/api
  26. http://code.haskell.org/hoogle/
  27. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-7.html
  28. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c/wiki/
  29. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hpysics
  30. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell
  31. http://code.haskell.org/~Saizan/cabal
  32. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library_submissions
  33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9558
  34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9589
  35. http://blogs.msdn.com/ralflammel/archive/2008/07/15/research-positions-on-mo...
  36. http://adapt.uni-koblenz.de/
  37. http://planet.haskell.org/
  38. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  39. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/07/16/real-world-haskellers-at-osc...
  40. http://r6.ca/blog/20080716T131235Z.html
  41. http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/call-for-an-icfp-mars-server/
  42. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-5-progress.html
  43. http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/icfp-programming-contest-reflections...
  44. http://sambangu.blogspot.com/2008/07/help-with-study-of-functional
  45. http://eigenclass.org/hiki/quicksort-erratum
  46. http://blogs.msdn.com/ralflammel/archive/2008/07/15/research-positions-on-mo...
  47. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/07/14/compiler-plugins-for-ghc-week-five/
  48. http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog.php?id=1107301689
  49. http://blog.tupil.com/stemming-with-haskell/
  50. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/stemmer
  51. http://www.sphinxsearch.com/
  52. http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/14/haskell-is-popular-on-irc/
  53. http://thingsthatmikethinks.blogspot.com/2008/07/icfp-programming-contest-08...
  54. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/07/13/ch-isomorphism-duality/
  55. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/354
  56. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/07/msfp-2008.html
  57. http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~scm/2008/tail-recursive-linear-time-fibonacci/
  58. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-7.html
  59. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=108
  60. http://jpmoresmau.blogspot.com/2008/07/instance-data-map-where-half-done.htm...
  61. http://carback.us/rick/blog/?p=24
  62. http://jdfrens.blogspot.com/2008/07/pe-problem-2-in-all-languages-part-ii.ht...
  63. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/07/10/required-optimization/
  64. http://www.londonhug.net/2008/07/10/anglohaskell-2008/
  65. http://hoostus.blogspot.com/2008/07/random-programming.html
  66. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  67. http://sequence.complete.org/
  68. http://planet.haskell.org/
  69. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  70. http://haskell.org/
  71. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/archives/20080716.pdf
  72. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  73. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/