--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090314 Issue 109 - March 14, 2009 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 109 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. Congratulations to the authors of RWH on their [2]Jolt award! Some cool libraries released this week (as usual), and some really cool PhD [3]opportunities at Strathclyde. Also, it seems that I was censured last week for not including any quotes in the HWN, which is because tunes.org (which hosts the #haskell logs) was down while I was putting it together. So, this time I've included quotes going back two weeks, I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY Community News Tom DuBuisson (TomMD) has [4]moved to Portland and will be starting a PhD at Portland State soon. Announcements darcs fundraising drive - only $720 left to go!. Eric Kow [5]announced that [6]donations are still being accepted to help pay for travel to the upcoming Haskell hackathon. So far we have raised $280, so we're almost a third of the way there. Think you can help? Vintage BASIC 1.0. Lyle Kopnicky [7]announced the initial release of [8]Vintage BASIC, an interpreter for microcomputer-era BASIC. Fully unit-tested, it faithfully implements the common elements of the language. On the web site, you can find 102 games from the classic book BASIC Computer Games, all of which run flawlessly. Have fun! ThreadScope: Request for features for the performance tuning of parallel and concurrent Haskell programs. Satnam Singh [9]requested feedback on infrastructure for logging run-time events and a graphical viewer program called [10]ThreadScope. The goal is for these features to make it into the next release of GHC. torch-0.1. Yusaku Hashimoto [11]announced a new unit test framework, [12]torch-0.1. sparsebit 0.5 - Sparse Bitmaps for Pattern Match Coverage. Ki Yung Ahn [13]announced the release of the [14]sparsebit library. This library packages the functional peal paper [15]Sparse Bitmaps for Pattern Match Coverage submitted to ICFP 2009 by Ki Yung Ahn and Tim Sheard. happs-tutorial 0.8. Crieghton Hogg [16]announced the release of [17]happs-tutorial 0.8, which is compatible with [18]happstack-0.2. A number of changes have occurred in this release, including general code cleanup, migration to the new Happstack.Server.SimpleHTTP API, and more. Future 1.1.0 concurrency library. ChrisK [19]announced the [20]future package, which ought to do what C++ standard futures/promises do, plus a bit more. The main operation is forkPromise :: IO a -> IO (Promise a), which sets the "IO a" operation running in a fresh thread; the eventual result can be accessed in many ways (non-blocking, blocking, blocking with timeout). Holumbus-MapReduce 0.0.1. Stefan Schmidt [21]announced three new libraries: [22]Holumbus-MapReduce, [23]Holumbus-Distribution, and [24]Holumbus-Storage, which provide tools for building distributed systems. These libraries are used as the backbone of the [25]Holumbus search engine. Turbinado V0.6. Alson Kemp [26]announced the release of [27]Turbinado 0.6, a Rails-ish Model-View-Controller web serving framework for Haskell. New features include support for CGI serving, statically compiled Layouts, Views, and Controllers, lower case paths, support for cookies and encrypted cookie sessions, easier installation, and support for GHC 6.10. iteratee-0.1.0. John Lato [28]announced the hackage release of [29]iteratee-0.1.0. This library implements enumerators and iteratees [30]as proposed by Oleg Kiselyov. Harpy 0.4.4 - Runtime code generation for x86 machine code. Dirk Kleeblatt [31]announced the release of [32]Harpy 0.4.1, a library for runtime code generation for x86 machine code. The new release features additional Eq instances, support for new prefetching instructions, and some bug fixes. Discussion Suggestion for a Haskell mascot. Maur�cio [33]suggested using a sloth as the Haskell mascot. If you would like to know how to say 'sloth' in just about every language ever, read this thread. Jobs Microsoft PhD Scholarship at Strathclyde. Conor McBride [34]announced another PhD opportunity at Strathclyde, sponsored by Microsoft Research, to investigate the practical and theoretical impact of extending Haskell's type system with numeric expressions (representing sizes, or ranges, or costs, for example) and constraints capturing richer safety properties than are currently managed by static typing. Blog noise [35]Haskell news from the [36]blogosphere. * Braden Shepherdson: [37]Pimp Your XMonad #4: Urgency Hooks. * Thomas M. DuBuisson: [38]Explicit Parallelism via Thread Pools. * Ketil Malde: [39]Current developments. Ongoing development of the biohaskell libraries for bioinformatics. * Philip Wadler: [40]Cafe Scientifique. Philip will be giving a talk, "Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing", on Monday in Edinburgh. * Yi: [41]Yi 0.6.0 Release Notes. * Alson Kemp: [42]ANNOUNCE: Turbinado V0.6. * GHC / OpenSPARC Project: [43]Thread activity plotting. * Real-World Haskell: [44]We won a Jolt Award!. * Real-World Haskell: [45]Real World Haskell on the Kindle 2. * Christophe Poucet (vincenz): [46]Bootstrapping cabal. * Gtk2HS: [47]Mickinator File Manager. * Osfameron: [48](rough) Grids in Haskell. Some notes on representing 2D grids in Haskell. * Manuel M T Chakravarty: [49]These graphs summarise the performance of Data Parallel Haskell.... * GHC / OpenSPARC Project: [50]Project midpoint. * GHC / OpenSPARC Project: [51]The GNU Debugger and me. * Don Stewart (dons): [52]Evolving faster Haskell programs. Using genetic algorithms to find optimal flag combinations. * Xmonad: [53]Xmonad and the Gimp. * Xmonad: [54]xmonad on eee. * Mark Wassell: [55]Conversations with a type checker. * Holumbus: [56]Holumbus-MapReduce on Hackage. Some neat libraries for building distributed systems! * Darcs: [57]darcs weekly news #20. * Nick Mudge: [58]First Bay Area Haskell Meeting. * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [59]Dinatural Transformations and Coends. Quotes of the Week * mmorrow: when i first saw haskell i was like "holy shitfork! that's what i've been trying to do in C for forever!" * pastah: the maybe monad is like cheating. everything is so awesomelly easy. * wli: Monads are like constipation. Comonads are like Ex-Lax. * TomMD: Never trust IO. * Axman6: let blah f x = f (blah f x) in blah ("blah "++) "" * MyCatVerbs: Lazy IO is implemented in terms of unsafePerformIO, you, you, you silly bipedal carbon-based organism. * MyCatVerbs: Amdahl's law is mostly to be used for making people feel depressed. * Axman6: -ddump-occur-anal <- another terrible name... * AchimSchneider: Finite automata don't go bottom in any case, at least not if you don't happen to shoot them and their health drops below zero. * ski: the truth (semantics), the whole truth (completeness), and nothing but the truth (soundness) * f4hy: wait you can do a show on an infinite list?! (I am starting to think haskell is not a programming language, it is evil wizardry) * Baughn: concat $ forM [(1,2), (4,5)] $ \(a,b) -> show (b,a+b) About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [60]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [61]the Haskell Sequence and [62]Planet Haskell. [63]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [64]haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [65]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [66]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2009/03/12/we-won-a-jolt-award/ 3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16944 4. http://tommd.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/explicit-parallelism-via-thread-pools/ 5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54758 6. http://www.darcs.net/donations.html 7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54652 8. http://www.vintage-basic.net/ 9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54521 10. http://raintown.org/threadscope 11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54445 12. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/torch 13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54436 14. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/sparsebit 15. http://kyagrd.dyndns.org/wiki/SparseBitmapsForPatternMatchCoverage 16. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-March/057305.html 17. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/happs%2Dtutorial 18. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/happstack 19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54409 20. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/future 21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54325 22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Holumbus%2DMapRed... 23. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Holumbus-Distribu... 24. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Holumbus-Storage 25. http://www.holumbus.org/redmine/wiki/holumbus 26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16953 27. http://www.turbinado.org/ 28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16945 29. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/iteratee 30. http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/Iteratee/ 31. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16942 32. http://uebb.cs.tu-berlin.de/harpy/ 33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/54418 34. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16944 35. http://planet.haskell.org/ 36. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 37. http://braincrater.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/pimp-your-xmonad-4-urgency-hooks... 38. http://tommd.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/explicit-parallelism-via-thread-pools/ 39. http://blog.malde.org/index.php/2009/03/13/current-developments/ 40. http://wadler.blogspot.com/2009/03/cafe-scientifique.html 41. http://yi-editor.blogspot.com/2009/03/yi-060-release-notes.html 42. http://www.alsonkemp.com/haskell/announce-turbinado-v06/ 43. http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2009/03/thread-activity-plotting.html 44. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2009/03/12/we-won-a-jolt-award/ 45. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2009/03/13/real-world-haskell-on-the-ki... 46. http://cpoucet.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/bootstrapping-cabal/ 47. http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/archives/2009/03/10/mickinator-file-manager/ 48. http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/03/10/rough-grids-in-haskell/ 49. http://justtesting.org/post/85103645 50. http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2009/03/project-midpoint.html 51. http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2009/03/gnu-debugger-and-me.html 52. http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/evolving-faster-haskell-programs/ 53. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/xmonad-and-the-gimp/ 54. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/xmonad-on-eee/ 55. http://www.poundstone.org/blog/?p=23 56. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/blog/?p=18 57. http://blog.darcs.net/2009/03/darcs-weekly-news-20.html 58. http://nickmudge.info/?post=115 59. http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/03/dinatural-transformations-and-coends.html 60. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 61. http://sequence.complete.org/ 62. http://planet.haskell.org/ 63. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 64. http://haskell.org/ 65. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 66. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/