Welcome to issue 159 of the HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community in the week of November 07 - 13. We have a new GHC to celebrate! On November 16 the GHC team announced the [2]release of GHC 7.0.1. Plenty of goodness here, with many bug fixes and numerous performance improvements over the previous 6.12 branch. The good folks at GHC remind us that most users should countinue to use the Haskell Platform. This "release is aimed primarily at package maintainers and early adopters." Many kudos to the team! Curious about the most active members of the #haskell IRC channel? Out of around 28K "utterances" in the channel this week, 24% of them where spoken by the top 5 most active members. Not suprisingly, the dear lambdabot is at the top of the list. lambdabot 2094 kmc 1263 jmcarthur 1221 Eduard_Munteanu 1142 EvanR-work 1007 This week we had 299 messages posted to Haskell-Cafe (down 79 from last week), 26 stories posted to Reddit (4 less than last week), 36 questions posted to StackOverflow (4 less than last week), and 135 updates to Hackage (39 more than last week). Fun to see the different package maintainers upgrading their packages to the new GHC. Announcements Simon Meier uploaded [3]blaze-builder, a library which provides an abstraction of buffered output of byte streams and several convenience functions to exploit it. He notes that blaze-builder was inspired by the Data.Binary.Builder module. David Peixotto introduced the [4]Fibon benchmark tools and suite for running and analyzing programs. It includes an optional set of benchmark programs, including many taken from Hackage. Tom Lokhorst uploaded [5]language-cil, a library for manipulating Common Intermediate Language, the lowest level language used by Microsoft .NET and Mono. Janis Voigtländer announced that the [6]Haskell Communities and Activities Report is now available in both PDF and HTML format. Check it out and see what others in the community are doing. The list of contributors should be enough to convince you to read it! Top Reddit Stories * Manatee - a Haskell integrated environment written in Haskell Domain: hackage.haskell.org, Score: 34, Comments: 11 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e43y6/manatee_a_haskell_integrated_... Original: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/manatee * A Neighborhood of Infinity: Statistical Fingertrees Domain: blog.sigfpe.com, Score: 31, Comments: 4 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e3iph/a_neighborhood_of_infinity_st... Original: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2010/11/statistical-fingertrees.html * November 2010 edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report Domain: haskell.org, Score: 28, Comments: 3 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e3dps/november_2010_edition_of_the_... Original: http://haskell.org/communities/11-2010/html/report.html * Please Break Yesod Domain: docs.yesodweb.com, Score: 28, Comments: 0 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e4qfk/please_break_yesod/ Original: http://docs.yesodweb.com/blog/please-break-yesod/ * "Atomo - The programmer's programmable programming language" -- written in Haskell Domain: atomo-lang.org, Score: 28, Comments: 10 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e5m3i/atomo_the_programmers_program... Original: http://atomo-lang.org/ * Language.Cil Domain: hackage.haskell.org, Score: 27, Comments: 11 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e2fwm/languagecil/ Original: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/language-cil * Defragmenting lazy bytestrings for better performance Domain: lambda-view.blogspot.com, Score: 25, Comments: 0 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e4cbg/defragmenting_lazy_bytestring... Original: http://lambda-view.blogspot.com/2010/11/defragmenting-lazy-bytestrings.html * "We are looking for someone who has experience in porting **from** Haskell to java" Domain: haskell.org, Score: 22, Comments: 33 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e4km8/we_are_looking_for_someone_wh... Original: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-November/086228.html * Zeno: Automatically Prove Haskell Program Properties Domain: doc.ic.ac.uk, Score: 21, Comments: 5 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e5ph3/zeno_automatically_prove_hask... Original: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ws506/tryzeno/ * Tips on a Computer Algebra System in Haskell? Domain: self.haskell, Score: 20, Comments: 17 On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e348f/tips_on_a_computer_algebra_sy... Original: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/e348f/tips_on_a_computer_algebra_sy... Top StackOverflow Questions * Is performance of partial or curried functions well defined in Haskell? votes: 13, answers: 4 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4166924/is-performance-of-partial-or-curr... * What Self Balancing Tree is simplest in Functional Programming? votes: 11, answers: 3 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4166027/what-self-balancing-tree-is-simpl... * Attoparsec allocates a ton of memory on large 'take' call. votes: 7, answers: 0 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4151265/attoparsec-allocates-a-ton-of-mem... * Emacs Haskell indentation votes: 7, answers: 1 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4169962/emacs-haskell-indentation * What is the difference between Pattern Matching and Guards? votes: 5, answers: 4 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4156727/what-is-the-difference-between-pa... * Impact on style of GHC -Wall votes: 5, answers: 4 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4174629/impact-on-style-of-ghc-wall * Cartesian product votes: 4, answers: 9 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4119730/cartesian-product * What's wrong with my type signatures here? votes: 4, answers: 1 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4125692/whats-wrong-with-my-type-signatur... * combining StateT and State votes: 4, answers: 2 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4138671/combining-statet-and-state * Useful projects in Haskell votes: 4, answers: 2 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4167864/useful-projects-in-haskell Quotes of the week * hpc: (<$>) = fmap; (<*>) = magic * medfly: it's awesome not to be an expert here. you ask questions that you think are difficult and they are so easy to others that they are all excited to explain it to you. * EvanR: think of [grant applications] as the interface to the real world, like the IO monad * ray: every paul graham essay contains an ad-hoc, informally specified implementation of a good idea About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [7]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [8]the Haskell Sequence and [9]Planet Haskell. [10]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [11]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://new-www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/release-7-0-1.htm... 3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/18283 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/18288 5. http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-cafe/browse_thread/thread/9f737300586... 6. http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-cafe/browse_thread/thread/860f3a2e9c7... 7. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 8. http://sequence.complete.org/ 9. http://planet.haskell.org/ 10. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 11. http://haskell.org/