--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080830 Issue 83 - August 30, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 83 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. This is the "better late than never" edition. As an excuse I could tell you that my home internet service has been horrible (now fixed) and I was away from home for a few days with my wife celebrating our third wedding anniversary. But instead, I give you a link to the [2]Uncyclopedia entry on Haskell. If you haven't already seen it, you should give it a read, being sure not to drink any milk at the same time, or at least pointing your nose away from the keyboard if you insist on drinking milk. Community News If Dell sends John Goerzen (CosmicRay) one more catalog, it will [3]actually be a federal crime. Announcements LogFloat 0.9. wren ng thornton [4]announced a new official release of the [5]logfloat package for manipulating log-domain floating numbers. This release is mainly for those who are playing with Transfinite rather than LogFloat, but the interface changes warrant a minor version change. validating xml lib - need some guidance. Marc Weber [6]asked for help developing an xml generating library validating the result against a given DTD. gsl-random 0.1 and monte-carlo-0.1. Patrick Perry [7]announced that he has started on [8]bindings for the random number generators and random distributions provided by the gsl. He has also written a [9]monad and transformer for doing monte carlo computations that uses gsl-random internally. For a quick tutorial in the latter package, see [10]his blog. Wired 0.1.1. Emil Axelsson [11]announced the first release of the hardware description library [12]Wired. Wired can be seen as an extension to Lava that targets (not exclusively) semi-custom VLSI design. A particular aim of Wired is to give the designer more control over the routing wires' effects on performance. darcs weekly news #1. Eric Kow [13]sent out the first edition of the new Darcs Weekly News! zip-archive 0.0. John MacFarlane [14]announced the release of the [15]zip-archive library for dealing with zip archives. The Monad.Reader - Issue 11. Wouter Swierstra [16]announced a new issue of [17]The Monad.Reader, with articles by David Place, Kenn Knowles, and Doug Auclair. First Monad Tutorial of the Season. Hans van Thiel [18]announced a new monad tutorial, [19]The Greenhorn's Guide to becoming a Monad Cowboy. "Real World Haskell" hits a milestone. Bryan O'Sullivan [20]proudly announced that the draft manuscript of Real World Haskell is [21]complete! It is now available online in its entirety. The authors expect the final book to be published around the beginning of November, and to weigh in at about 700 pages. Mueval 0.5.1, 0.6, 0.6.1, 0.6.2, 0.6.3, 0.6.4. Gwern Branwen [22]announced a number of new releases of [23]Mueval. Lambdabot now uses mueval for all its dynamic Haskell evaluation needs. Hoogle Database Generation. Neil Mitchell (ndm) [24]announced that a new release of the [25]Hoogle command line is out, including bug fixes and additional features. Upgrading is recommended.Two interesting features of Hoogle 4 are working with multiple function databases (from multiple packages), and running your own web server. Blog noise [26]Haskell news from the [27]blogosphere. * Real-World Haskell: [28]Source handed over to production. * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [29]Earning \bot-Trophies. * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [30]Scanner-parsers II: State Monad Transformers. * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [31]Scanner-parsers I: lifting functions. * >>> software engineering radio: [32]Episode 108: Simon Peyton Jones on Functional Programming and Haskell. A podcast interview with Simon Peyton Jones. * Neil Mitchell: [33]Running your own Hoogle on a Web Server. * Braden Shepherdson: [34]Announcing xmonad-light. Braden is rolling out a new configuration framework for xmonad, providing an easier learning curve for those not wanting to learn Haskell right away, and an easy transition to a more powerful Haskell configuration when they want it. * Gabor Grief: [35]Category. Gabor is excited that base-3.0 will include Control.Category. * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [36]Ten = 1+2+3+4. Solving an arithmetic puzzle with Haskell, Prolog-style. * Paul R Brown: [37]perpubplat now on github. * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [38]"Lucky you!"?. Doug shares some secrets of his success in getting Haskell/Dylan/Mercury/Prolog jobs. * Neil Mitchell: [39]Hoogle Database Generation. Neil releases a new command-line version of Hoogle, including bug fixes and additional features -- multiple function databases and the ability to run your own Hoogle server. * Patrick Perry: [40]A Monte Carlo Monad for Haskell. * Mads Lindstroem: [41]Proposal: Adding composability to WxHaskell. * Tom Moertel: [42]PXSL Tools now on Hackage and GitHub. * Gabor Greif: [43]Uploaded. Gabor uploads his first contribution to Hackage, [44]thrist-0.1. * Muad`Dib (vixey): [45]Tail Call Optimization doesn't exist in Haskell. * >>> Hans van Thiel: [46]The Greenhorn's Guide to becoming a Monad Cowboy. YAMT * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [47]Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 2. Dan continues his excellent series on rational tangles, this time showing the connection between tangles and rational numbers. * >>> Praki Prakash: [48]Learning Haskell Redux. * Gabor Greif: [49]Ca(ni)balized. Gabor creates his first cabal package! * Real-World Haskell: [50]Our writing is now complete!. * Tom Moertel: [51]Thinking algebraically: a functional-programming dividend that pays during your imperative-programming day job. * Jason Dagit: [52]Darcs 2 Real-World Push Performance Evaluation. * Well-Typed.Com: [53]What's wrong with make?. A lot, apparently: it's too static, and makes it easy to write incorrect rules. Duncan (dcoutts) provides an analysis. * Dougal Stanton: [54]Lord of the Flies as a window onto monadic IO. * Real-World Haskell: [55]A tighter page count estimate. Real World Haskell is going to be about 700 pages!? * Real-World Haskell: [56]Real World Haskell tutorial next month at DEFUN 2008. Quotes of the Week * shepheb: #haskell isn't so much on-topic when discussing Haskell, but off-off-topic. * chrisdone: it's neat how you learn haskell because you are drawn in by the purely functional paradigm, and then you find loads more things like algebraic data types, monad abstractions, arrows and applicative, lack of objects... so that when people say "well, it's not haskell, but at least X is functional", it's just not the same at all * lambdabot: [tristes_tigres] @vixen unsafe [lambdabot] you're turning me on :) * b\6: sometimes i make variables f and ck and find some reason to multiply them like f*ck if i'm having a bad day. * waynemokane: wow... thanks everyone - it looks like I have a full day of reading type signatures ahead of me. * mauke: call/cthulhu * seydar: monads are just like saran wrap. * b\6: keep this info private, but you can actually overclock your brain. the technique i use is to loop mplayer playing oggs but increase the speed like -speed 1.25 for 125% normal. your brain's speed increases accordingly, allowing you to solve problems much more easily. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [57]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [58]the Haskell Sequence and [59]Planet Haskell. [60]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [61]haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [62]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [63]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . 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