*Editorial:*Over a month has elapsed since the last issue. Is the Weekly News turning into the Monthly News? No. I've been working on getting full-length articles into the News. Imagine articles that investigate, analyze, and give the low-down on hoary issues like cabal hell that cannot be telegrammed in a two-sentence paragraph. But my time isn't quantum mechanical. When I do A, I can't at the same time do B. I know that there are fine haskellers who'd gladly write for pay. However, HWN has never had a foundation in place for paid articles. Building that foundation takes time. Now that much of it is in place, let me duly announce that HWN hereby solicits reviews, reports, criticism pieces, and personal essays. - Flexible word count: anywhere between 250 and 750 is fine. - Send me an outline first. - Published articles pay at 68 bitcents, under 200 euros / dollars right now. - You can count on extensive editing for the requisite polish and also to conform to 'house' style. Interested? Email me with a subject line that starts with "[HWN pitch]" followed by the title of your piece. In the body, outline the main points you'll hit and explain how they engage the HWN readership. So on with the News : *Top picks:* - Galois organizes this year's ICFP contest. The 72-hour countdown has just started! After tantalizing us with whisperings of more computational archaelogy (see 2006 ICFP contest http://www.boundvariable.org/) centering on honey bees, national food security, and the Hebrew alphabet; Portland, Oregon reveals a classic offline AI game programming challenge http://icfpcontest.org/spec.html. According to redditor skatenerd https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3g1n8f/this_years_icfp_contest_sta..., "it's a lot like Tetris, except you know what pieces are coming." - Rick Dzekman http://rickdzekman.com/thoughts/the-haskell-user-experience/ offers constructive criticism based on his "poor UX (User Experience) of a great language (Haskell)". Among the low-lying fruit he identifies: a web search doesn't always link to the latest version on the Hackage website, something easily fixed. Not so low-lying are Cabal, a modern IDE, and Haskell wiki documentation. In sympathy with the sentiments are HN readers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008169 and /r/haskell https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3ftsh0/the_haskell_user_experience... . - Christoffer Stjernlöf brings attention to how only in imperative land does one encounter the awfulness of the same boolean expression getting tested twice in a nested if-inside-if. He uses it to make "the case for controlled side effects", the title of his blog post. Discussions on /r/haskell http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3fzmt6/the_case_for_controlled_side... and Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10017613. - Alexey Shmalko introduces Haskell IO as "the command pattern" http://www.alexeyshmalko.com/2015/io-is-your-command-pattern/ to object-oriented programmers. His article resists mentioning monads or do-notation. Appreciated on /r/haskell http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3fzmt6/the_case_for_controlled_side... . - The latest issue of the Functional Works monthly newsletter http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=30f19e2c5b9f15cfb95906716&id=cee1ab0dc6 reminds us about Chakravarty and Keller's "An Introduction to Computing (with Haskell)", a textbook written from multiple years teaching first-year CS. At 150 pages, the book dodges monads -- nary a single mention -- and zooms into I/O actions. It's out-of-print but readily downloadable https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/#sec:books. - The program for this year's Haskell Symposium https://www.haskell.org/haskell-symposium/2015/ is out. PC chaired by Ben Lippmeier, it's truly a smorgasbord. If you can't find a preprint, indefatigable redditors http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3dxxj3/haskell_symposium_2015_accep... might just have got you covered. - Zhenjiang Hu, John Hughes, and Meng Wang publish "How Functional Programming Mattered" http://nsr.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/07/13/nsr.nwv042, a survey of FP's impact outside its academic domain in recent years. It is written in the mold of and complements A History of Haskell: Being Lazy with Class (2007) http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/history-of-hask.... Comprising 17.5 pages of 2-column ACM-proceedings-style 9-point text, it houses the bibliographical treasure of 122 references, itself a contribution to any debate over priority. /r/haskell https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3f5yew/how_functional_programming_... - Victor Maia writes a lambda calculus evaluator in javascript https://github.com/SrVictorMaia/optlam that computes 200^200 mod 31 without breaking a sweat. No mean feat, since all numbers are church numerals. How did he pull it off? His javascript implements a fragment of Lamping's optimal algorithm, which is based on interaction nets. (Optimality here is in the sense of Levy-optimality: keeping the number of beta reductions down to an absolute minimum. By itself, this count is generally an inaccurate measure of efficiency.) He wonders on stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31707614/why-are-%CE%BB-calculus-optimal-... why optimal evaluation has such magical superpowers. The convo at /r/haskell http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3f21wv/why_are_%CE%BBcalculus_optim... has yet to crack the mystery. - Philippe Desjardins Proulx http://phdp.github.io/posts/2015-04-05-automated-reasoning.html codes and compares a basic arithmetic expression evaluator in all 5 languages of F#, Scala, Haskell, C++, and Julia. The evaluator acts on a given tree: Philippe doesn't touch parsing. Go, Erlang, and Elixir versions are in HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995896. - Redditor gilmi starts a discussion on /r/haskell about the various FRP systems https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3fr5ij/frp_systems_discussion/ out there and whether they're ready for real-world use. Ollie Charles glosses classic vs arrowized systems, Doug Beardsley at Soostone testifies that "reflex is the first thing I've used that makes building web UIs enjoyable for me, which is very exciting", and Joseph Abrahamson channels Conal Elliott in staking out the acronym to mean exclusively those systems that admit continuous time. *Quotes of the Week:* - Andrew Cowie https://twitter.com/afcowie/status/612764291863703552: The highlight of my day is "cd ~/src/haskell/stack ; git pull ; stack install". What goodies have they landed this time? - Cale Gibbard http://ircbrowse.net/browse/haskell?id=20873306×tamp=1434453345#t1434453345: I basically never turn on IncoherentInstances because it basically means "I don't want anything to work, and I'd like to be confused about why." - Redditor fegu https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3fqiff/dont_give_up_on_haskell/ctr...: Haskell is like a mental drug, after a few initial hits you absolutely crave it. You will forego lucrative .Net career moves just to keep it, hence your long-term career will take a hit. But the days will be brighter, more enjoyable and there is just that glimmer of hope that in the end you will be able to practice Haskell full time in a well-paid position. I wish I was joking. - On ageism in the software industry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9710936#up_9711829: Maybe I've been lucky, but this doesn't mesh with my experience at all. The oldest guys at my company are the ones teaching the classes about Haskell or Scalaz. They're the ones trying out Elixir. They're the ones building frameworks for everyone else to build on top of. The youngest people are banging out feature #4,501 for the website. *Real World Haskell of the Week:* - Fed up with the laggy Netflix UI? Check out the snappy Haskell-powered instantwatcher.com. H/T erichmond on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10013434#up_10016932. -- Kim-Ee