Welcome to issue 214 the HWN, a newsletter covering stories, questions,
and remarks seen around the web during the week of January 29 to
February 4, 2012.
You can find the HTML version at:
Quotes of the Week
* Jafet: [on memoising an O(n) algorithm:] This is like trying to
save work in a police investigation by having each detective
determine whether another detective has already removed all
evidence from his area by walking through it to search for evidence
in the area.
* CodeWeaver: keep in mind encryption's only as good as how much you
trust that the implementors got it right.
* cmccann: length [1..10^20]
lambdabot: mueval-core: Time limit exceeded
cmccann: looks like 10^20 is infinity
* elliott: race condition waiting to happen
* elliott: o'reilly publishes attoparsec tutorial: exactly the same
as their parsec tutorial, but 10^-18th the size
* rwbarton: Num works for Float/Double, it's Float/Double that
doesn't work for Num
* ddarius: Space isn't that big.
* Brent Yorgey:
> Sometimes, I suspect that Haskell not only makes easier of the hard
> things for imperative programming languages but also makes harder of
> some easy things.
This is true. But usually these are things that you don't *want* to
be easy, like shooting yourself in the kidney. (But these features are
often described in ways that make them sound great, like "flexible
usage of bullet-placement tools".) Inserting arbitrary print
statements into the middle of some code is difficult for a reason.
Top Reddit Stories
* GHC 7.4.1 is out. Here's the release notes
* Coming soon, to a bookstore near you
* ImplicitCAD is a Programmatic CAD Tool/3D Modelling Engine in Haskell.
Also my first big Haskell project. Feedback, advice?
* Using monadic effects to reverse a merge sort
* Exciting changes coming to conduit 0.2
* Vectorisation without Replication in Data Parallel Haskell
* If software purity in functional languages is such an awesome idea, why are
we still writing Python, Ruby or Java?
Domain: self.haskell, Score: 33, Comments: 136
* Released Data.Array.Accelerate 0.9.0.0 — the Haskell array library for GPUs
* Fun With -XPolyKinds : Polykinded Folds
* Introduction to using acid-state, IxSet and data-lens as a native Haskell,
noSQL, RAM-cloud database
* Can't wait for the Haskell Platform? -- Compiling GHC 7.4.1 from source has
never been easier.
* Generating random functions
* How to deal with undesired values when designing types
Domain: self.haskell, Score: 19, Comments: 28
* Guarded Pipes or How to write Conduit.List Combinators in Pipes.
* UHC JavaScript Backend Project Page (Work in Progress)
Top StackOverflow Questions
* What are the rules about concurrently accessing a persistent database
votes: 17, answers: 1
* Functions don't just have types: They ARE Types. And Kinds. And Sorts. Help
put a blown mind back together
votes: 15, answers: 2
* Defining polymorphic constants in Haskell
votes: 12, answers: 2
* Do guarded pipes behave the same as pipes using await?
votes: 12, answers: 2
* What is the purpose of the IdentityT transformer?
votes: 11, answers: 2
* call/cc implementation?
votes: 10, answers: 5
* Understanding bind function in Haskell
votes: 9, answers: 4
* How to show that a monad is a functor and an applicative functor?
votes: 8, answers: 2
* Avoiding lift with Monad Transformers
votes: 7, answers: 2
* Container element types
votes: 7, answers: 1
Until next time,
Daniel Santa Cruz
References