Top picks:
- Neil Mitchell reports a stack overflow with 7.10.2 maximumBy that regresses from 7.8.3. His sixth sense points to the Foldable-Traversable coup (aka BBP: Burning Bridges Proposal) as culprit. Joachim Breitner investigates and verifies that the bug's indeed caused by BBP's redefinition of maximumBy that changed out foldl1 for foldr1. Neil guesses that with foldl1, "the strictness analysis managed to kick in and optimise things." Joachim opines that "this is more a BBP design issue than a compiler bug." For now, roll your own maximumBy if you're affected.
- A reddit question asks whether there's a way for "haskell learners to learn haskell from haskell gurus, one-on-one for a fee?" An answer points to CodeMentor where haskellers charge from $15 to $60 per quarter-hour of consultation. Heinrich Apfelmus chimes in to say he's at HackHands.
- Yair Chuchem, who worked at Google for a year, reveals how a software engineer's performance metric is gamed to the detriment of the Organizer of the World's Information. Not quite Wally's "I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon" but close. To the indignation of his managers, Yair left Google to work with Eyal Lotem on his passion: an Abstract-Syntax-Tree-driven IDE called Lamdu, which redditors have already unpacked here.
- Ph.D. student Rob Zinkov demoes a rudimentary Probabilistic Programming Interpreter based on importance sampling.
Quotes of the Week:
- User kyllo on HN: It's an exciting time for Haskell developers right now, we just got an a awesome new build tool (stack), an incredible new server-side framework (servant) and our compile to JS tool (GHCJS) is improving by leaps and bounds.
- @gfixler: Was OOP created as a business model to sell complex tooling?
@jonruttenberg: @gfixler Was #haskell created as a business model to sell complex blog posts?
- User breadbox on HN observes: "People think that confidence follows skills, but it’s usually the other way around where skills follow confidence." This is a fact that really needs to be more widely acknowledged. (It also casts the microagressions that have the effect of chipping away at the confidence of women and minorities in a rather uncomfortable light.)
- User mgrennan on HN: I understand it is our nature to push away from parents to strike out on our own. I also understand why older people resist change. Magic happens when the young seek to understand the wisdom of their elders and elders hold on to explorer spirit of their youth.
-- Kim-Ee