Dear Gentle Reader,

Many, many beautiful gems in the Haskell Weekly News archives are worth a second look.

To give you a taste, I reproduce below excerpts from the quotes section of the Jan 31, 2007 issue -- yes, that's 9 years ago -- under the editorship of Don Stewart.

Enjoy.

Best, Kim-Ee Yeoh

Top Picks

Edsko de Vries designs O(1)-amortized and O(1)-worst-case queues using a technique different from the standard literature by Chris Okasaki. In particular, the O(1)-worst-case queue employs a Progress datatype that could be reused to also optimize data structures other than queues. On the other hand, Lennart Augustsson on /r/haskell was pleased as a plum until he saw the unsafeInterleaveST required to pull off the Progress technique.

Elsewhere, Hacker News rates the article highly enough for it to stay on the front page for five hours. However, the comments there belie that the advanced Haskell goes swoosh over the head of the average HN reader.
Philipp Schuster sketches a FRP implementation based on temporal logic. Neel Krishnaswami explains on /r/haskell why it suffers from space leaks like most other FRP implementations and ways of fixing it.
Dan Burton reports that the latest version 0.10 of the json parsing package aeson suffers from deal-breaking bugs. Aeson author Bryan O'Sullivan, of an older email-centered generation, explains that he has "a life outside of checking github issues" in the /r/haskell discussion. In any case, the next stepping 5 of Stackage LTS rolls it back to version 0.9.
A redditor asks, "What's the TypeInType extension planned for the upcoming version 8 of GHC?" The short answer is that it's used for dependent type programming. Detailed answers can be found in the actual /r/haskell Q&A.
GHC on ARM used to suffer over 100 failures on the testsuite. Ben Gamari girds his loins and over the last 6 weeks battled against "the villains that plague this poor architecture." Result? Nightly builds now compile clean. Go Ben!

A Blast from the Past (Quotes from #Haskell IRC):

huschi: Programing in haskell seems a bit frustrating. i'm missing searching for errors :(
bakert: I know all my programs can be reduced to only one tenth the size if only I can learn all these crazy functions

Quote of the Week

Will Jones: The more I write Haskell, the more it feels like Forth. Where I'm basically just inventing a language for my problem, then writing the program in that instead.

(Ed. Dear Will: Remember how Dijkstra once said "Always design your programs as a member of a whole family of programs, including those that are likely to succeed it"? He would have warmly congratulated you on your discovery.)

-- Kim-Ee Yeoh