--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20081001 Issue 87 - October 01, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 87 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. ICFP was held last week in Victoria, and by all accounts was a great success! This edition of the HWN includes much ICFP and Haskell Symposium-related content, including [2]videos of the Haskell symposium presentations, [3]programming contest results, some [4]notes on the future of Haskell, and slides from [5]a Haskell tutorial and [6]a talk about the Haskell Platform. But ICFP didn't seem to slow down the community all that much: you'll find the usual mix of newly released and updated packages, blog posts, mailing list discussions, and silly quotes as well. Announcements Haskell-Embedded System Design: ForSyDe 3.0 and Tutorial. Alfonso Acosta [7]announced the [8]3.0 release of [9]ForSyDe. The ForSyDe (Formal System Design) methodology has been developed with the objective to move system design (e.g. System on Chip, Hardware and Software systems) to a higher level of abstraction. ForSyDe is implemented as a Haskell-embedded behavioral DSL (Domain Specific Language). The 3.0 release includes a new deep-embedded DSL and embedded compiler, as well as a new user-friendly tutorial. Graphalyze-0.1. Ivan Miljenovic [10]announced the initial release of his graph-theoretic analysis library, [11]Graphalyze. This is a pre-release of the library he is writing for his mathematics honours thesis, "Graph-Theoretic Analysis of the Relationships in Discrete Data". Symposium videos. Malcolm Wallace [12]announced [13]guerrilla videos of the Haskell Symposium 2008 presentations. ICFP programming contest results. Malcolm Wallace [14]sent a link to [15]a video of the ICFP programming contest results presentation. Version 0.4.3 of happs-tutorial is a HAppS job board, done in HAppS.. Thomas Hartman [16]announced version 4 of the [17]self-demoing HAppS tutorial, a HAppS job board. TH code for deriving Binary and NFData instances. Tim Newsham [18]announced some [19]Template Haskell code for automatically deriving Data.Binary and Control.Parallel.Strategies.NFData instances. Notes on the future of Haskell from ICFP. Bryan O'Sullivan [20]posted a [21]writeup from the ICFP conference floor on the future of Haskell and functional programming. datapacker 1.0.1. John Goerzen [22]announced the [23]release of datapacker 1.0.1. A Functional Implementation of the Garsia-Wachs Algorithm. Nicolas Pouillard [24]announced a [25]Haskell implementation of an algorithm that builds a binary tree with minimum weighted path length from weighted leaf nodes given in symmetric order. This can be used to build optimum search tables, to balance a 'ropes' data structure in an optimal way. graphviz-2008.9.20. Ivan Miljenovic [26]announced a new version of [27]Matthew Sackman's Haskell bindings to Graphviz. See Ivan's original announcement for information on what new features are included, and what the difference is among the various graphviz-related packages on Hackage. darcs 2.1.0pre2. Eric Kow [28]announced the release of darcs 2.1.0pre2, formerly known as 2.0.3. See Eric's announcement for a list of new features and bug fixes in this release. protocol-buffers-0.2.9 for Haskell is ready. ChrisK [29]announced the release of the [30]protocol-buffers package, which generates Haskell data types that can be converted back and forth to lazy ByteStrings that interoperate with Google's generated code in C++/Java/python. panda blog engine. Jinjing Wang [31]announced the release of [32]panda, a simple blog engine written in Haskell. OpenSPARC project applicant chosen. Duncan Coutts [33]announced that Ben Lippmeier has been chosen for the [34]OpenSPARC project. Ben will spend three months hacking on GHC to make it perform well on the latest multi-core OpenSPARC chips. Hugs on the iPhone. Alberto Galdo [35]announced that he has gotten Hugs to run on the iPhone, and has made packages available for others who would like to install it as well. Discussion Shooting yourself in the foot in Haskell. John Van Enk [36]asked how to shoot yourself in the foot with Haskell, with humorous results. Total Functional Programming in Haskell. Jason Dagit started a [37]discussion on total functional programming, Haskell, abstraction boundaries and the IO monad, and related topics. Health effects. Andrew Coppin told a [38]story about a chocolate bar and recursion, which led to a discussion of optimization problems, Dedekind cuts, some meta-discussion of the discussion, and entirely too many puns. The container problem. Andrew Coppin [39]asked about the possibility if abstracting over various sorts of containers in Haskell, and why there isn't a widely used library that does this. A discussion of various container libraries and the language issues that arise followed. Red-Blue Stack. Matthew Eastman [40]asked how to implement a certain data structure (red-blue stacks) in Haskell. Several people responded with increasingly clever solutions, and a comparison of mutating vs. non-mutating algorithms. Climbing up the shootout.... Don Stewart began a long and ongoing [41]discussion about improving Haskell's performance on benchmarks in the [42]Shootout, now that there is a quad core machine for running benchmarks! Line noise. Andrew Coppin started an [43]interesting discussion about perceptions of Haskell syntax by programmers who aren't familiar with it. Jobs London FP job in asset management. Michael Bott [44]announced an opportunity for two functional programmers based in London, with a software house specialising in asset management. Blog noise [45]Haskell news from the [46]blogosphere. * Creighton Hogg: [47]Some first steps with Data.Reactive. Creighton gives some simple examples of using Conal Elliott's Reactive library. More to come! * Bryan O'Sullivan: [48]Unix hacking in Haskell: better pseudoterminal support. * Creighton Hogg: [49]One last thought on laziness. In Creighton's opinion, laziness is the single hardest thing to get used to in Haskell. If you're learning Haskell, don't despair, break out the pencil and paper! * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [50]Animal as RDR, part III. * Neil Mitchell: [51]General Updates. * Don Stewart (dons): [52]Newest Mersenne Prime. Haskell doesn't even break a sweat computing the largest known prime number. * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [53]Animal as RDR, part II. * Bryan O'Sullivan: [54]Using Bloom filters for large scale gene sequence analysis in Haskell. A paper that Bryan and Ketil Malde submitted to PADL 09. "The Cliff's Notes version: Bloom filters are almost unused in bioinformatics; they're tremendously useful; and our Haskell code is really fast. * >>> Zubin Wadia: [55]Simon Peyton Jones & Microsoft Research Cambridge. Zubin thinks quite highly of SPJ and MSR Cambridge. * Bryan O'Sullivan: [56]Slides from my DEFUN 2008 Haskell tutorial. * Mads Lindstroem: [57]Inheritance in Composites and Overlapping Instances. * >>> Micah Cowan: [58]Adventures in Haskell. Micah shares some thoughts on learning Haskell. * Bryan O'Sullivan: [59]Some notes on the future of Haskell and FP. * Well-Typed.Com: [60]Slides from the Haskell Platform talk. * Paul Johnson: [61]Why the banks collapsed, and how a paper on Haskell programming can help stop it happening next time. * >>> Nathan Sanders: [62]Two weeks of Haskell. Nathan shares some thoughts on his first two weeks learning Haskell. * Bryan O'Sullivan: [63]Twittering from ICFP / Haskell symposium / CUFP. * Real-World Haskell: [64]Slides from ACCU talk. * Eric Kow (kowey): [65]darcs weekly news #5. * John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [66]New version of datapacker. * >>> James Cowie: [67]Haskell, the verdict!. James is impressed with Haskell after using it for a few weeks. * >>> Alex Combas: [68]What's all this fuss about Haskell?. Alex is thinking of learning Haskell in his spare time. * Aaron Tomb: [69]Parsing the Linux kernel with Haskell: experience with Language.C. Aaron is impressed by the new Language.C libraries, which parses all 18 million pre-processed lines of Linux kernel source with no problems! Quotes of the Week * Fuse_: Oh, sorry for hijacking mathematical purity with dirty fiscal dynamical systems. :o * mauke: <mauke> data Mushroom badger = Mushroom badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger <leimy> where's the snake <mauke> deriving Snake * ddarius: higher order of lambdabot deployment and management engineers or HOLDME * Botje: #haskell: parallellising your homework answers! * olsner: most everything gives nicer everything than perl * Botje: fuzzy feelings aren't always aerodynamic, unfortunately. * chrisdone: benchmarks only exist to make fun of ruby * Claus Reinke: [on breaking code up into smaller bits] Once your readers understand your code, you can add the one-liner and ask for applause. * Jake Mcarthur: A fold by any other name would smell as sweet. * lispy: Schroedinger's cat is really in a thunk not a box * Bulat: Haskell was developed with goal to hide implementation details from egg-headed scientists and this obviously should have some drawbacks About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [70]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [71]the Haskell Sequence and [72]Planet Haskell. [73]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [74]haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [75]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [76]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . 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