• Galois organizes this year's ICFP contest. The 72-hour countdown has just started! After tantalizing us with whisperings of more computational archaelogy (see 2006 ICFP contest) centering on honey bees, national food security, and the Hebrew alphabet; Portland, Oregon reveals a classic offline AI game programming challenge. According to redditor skatenerd, "it's a lot like Tetris, except you know what pieces are coming."
  
  
• Rick Dzekman offers constructive criticism based on his "poor UX (User Experience) of a great language (Haskell)". Among the low-lying fruit he identifies: a web search doesn't always link to the latest version on the Hackage website, something easily fixed. Not so low-lying are Cabal, a modern IDE, and Haskell wiki documentation. In sympathy with the sentiments are HN readers and /r/haskell.
  
  
• Christoffer Stjernlöf brings attention to how only in imperative land does one encounter the awfulness of the same boolean expression getting tested twice in a nested if-inside-if. He uses it to make "the case for controlled side effects", the title of his blog post. Discussions on /r/haskell and Hacker News.
  
  
• Alexey Shmalko introduces Haskell IO as "the command pattern" to object-oriented programmers. His article resists mentioning monads or do-notation. Appreciated on /r/haskell.
  
  
• The latest issue of the Functional Works monthly newsletter reminds us about Chakravarty and Keller's "An Introduction to Computing (with Haskell)", a textbook written from multiple years teaching first-year CS. At 150 pages, the book dodges monads -- nary a single mention -- and zooms into I/O actions. It's out-of-print but readily downloadable.
  
  
• The program for this year's Haskell Symposium is out. PC chaired by Ben Lippmeier, it's truly a smorgasbord. If you can't find a preprint, indefatigable redditors might just have got you covered.
  
  
• Zhenjiang Hu, John Hughes, and Meng Wang publish "How Functional Programming Mattered", a survey of FP's impact outside its academic domain in recent years. It is written in the mold of and complements A History of Haskell: Being Lazy with Class (2007). Comprising 17.5 pages of 2-column ACM-proceedings-style 9-point text, it houses the bibliographical treasure of 122 references, itself a contribution to any debate over priority. /r/haskell
  
  
• Victor Maia writes a lambda calculus evaluator in javascript that computes 200^200 mod 31 without breaking a sweat. No mean feat, since all numbers are church numerals. How did he pull it off? His javascript implements a fragment of Lamping's optimal algorithm, which is based on interaction nets. (Optimality here is in the sense of Levy-optimality: keeping the number of beta reductions down to an absolute minimum. By itself, this count is generally an inaccurate measure of efficiency.) He wonders on stackoverflow why optimal evaluation has such magical superpowers. The convo at /r/haskell has yet to crack the mystery.
  
  
• Philippe Desjardins Proulx codes and compares a basic arithmetic expression evaluator in all 5 languages of F#, Scala, Haskell, C++, and Julia. The evaluator acts on a given tree: Philippe doesn't touch parsing. Go, Erlang, and Elixir versions are in HN comments.
  
  
• Redditor gilmi starts a discussion on /r/haskell about the various FRP systems out there and whether they're ready for real-world use. Ollie Charles glosses classic vs arrowized systems, Doug Beardsley at Soostone testifies that "reflex is the first thing I've used that makes building web UIs enjoyable for me, which is very exciting", and Joseph Abrahamson channels Conal Elliott in staking out the acronym to mean exclusively those systems that admit continuous time.
  
  

Quotes of the Week:

• Andrew Cowie: The highlight of my day is "cd ~/src/haskell/stack ; git pull ; stack install". What goodies have they landed this time?
  
  
• Cale Gibbard: I basically never turn on IncoherentInstances because it basically means "I don't want anything to work, and I'd like to be confused about why."
  
  
• Redditor fegu: Haskell is like a mental drug, after a few initial hits you absolutely crave it. You will forego lucrative .Net career moves just to keep it, hence your long-term career will take a hit. But the days will be brighter, more enjoyable and there is just that glimmer of hope that in the end you will be able to practice Haskell full time in a well-paid position. I wish I was joking.
  
  
• On ageism in the software industry: Maybe I've been lucky, but this doesn't mesh with my experience at all. The oldest guys at my company are the ones teaching the classes about Haskell or Scalaz. They're the ones trying out Elixir. They're the ones building frameworks for everyone else to build on top of. The youngest people are banging out feature #4,501 for the website.