--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080731 Issue 79 - July 31, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 79 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. Apologies for the slightly late issue this week, attributable to a combination of having to transfer all my files onto a different computer (my former employer had the audacity to request the return of their laptop, now that I no longer work for them) and packing up to move to Philadelphia on Saturday. At any rate, some exciting news this week, including #haskell passing the 500 mark and a new release of Yi -- enjoy! Community News Correction from last week's issue: congratulations were bestowed upon a certain "Dr. Johansson" who does not, in fact, exist, having been replaced almost a year ago by the happily married but otherwise identical Dr. Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson. Announcements A fancier Get monad or two (a la binary and binary-strict). Chris Kuklewicz [2]announced two new Get-like monads for binary data, with a number of additional features. #haskell irc channel reaches 500 users. Don Stewart [3]announced that 6 1/2 years after its inception, under the guiding hand of Shae Erisson (aka shapr), the [4]#haskell IRC channel on freenode has finally reached 500 users! This puts the channel at around the 12th largest (and mostest friendliest) community of the 7000 freenode channels. RandomDotOrg-0.1. Austin Seipp [5]announced the release of the [6]RandomDotOrg package, an interface to the [7]random.org random number generator. Mueval 0.3.1, 0.4, 0.4.5, 0.4.6, 0.5. Gwern Branwen [8]announced a number of releases of [9]Mueval, a package allowing dynamic runtime evaluation of Haskell expressions. As far as anyone knows, all possible security holes have been plugged, and it's missing only a few features before it can replace hs-plugins as lambdabot's evaluation mechanism. Need functional programmers for debugging study. Chris Bogart [10]asked for functional programmers currently developing or maintaining a medium to large-sized program, willing to let him look over their shoulder while they do debugging or coding on the project. Yi 0.4.1. Jean-Philippe Bernardy [11]announced the 0.4.1 release of the Yi editor, a text editor written and extensible in Haskell. The long-term goal of the Yi project is to provide the editor of choice for Haskell programmers. Hipmunk 0.1 and HipmunkPlayground 0.1. Felipe Lessa [12]announced the availability of [13]Hipmunk, containing bindings for the [14]Chipmunk 2D physics engine, and [15]Hipmunk Playground, where you may see some of Hipmunk's features in action. The bindings are low-level but try to hide most of the nasty details of the C code. faster BLAS bindings. Patrick Perry [16]announced that he has [17]largely closed the C performance gap with his recent [18]Haskell BLAS bindings. Expect a new release shortly. FPers in Northwest Arkansas?. Nathan Bloomfield [19]is wondering if there are any Haskellers in the NW Arkansas region to start a functional programming interest group in the area. Italian Haskellers Summer Meeting. Pasqualino 'Titto' Assini [20]announced something about a summer meeting for Italian Haskellers. If you would like to know precisely what it was that was announced, I suggest you learn Italian. InterleavableIO. Marco Tulio Gontijo e Silva [21]announced a package, [22]interleavableIO, based on Jules Bean (quicksilver)'s [23]monadic tunneling code. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [24]Google Summer of Code. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on [25]Hoogle 4. [26]This week, he rewrote type search: after three days of coding, it required only a few minor debugging tweaks to get it to work. Haskell FTW! Expect a public beta of the command line interface next week. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. [27]This week, he has finally got everything up and running bug free on the new API, except the internals are still using association lists instead of AVL trees. He also exhibits a promising benchmark. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a [28]physics engine using [29]Data Parallel Haskell. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a [30]make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is [31]working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on [32]improvements to the GHC API. Discussion Build system woes. Roman Leshchinskiy began a [33]discussion on Cabal and GHC's new build system, with some suggestions for improving the process. Syb Renovations? Issues with Data.Generics. Claus Reinke [34]brought up a number of issues with Data.Generics, with suggestions for improvement. A question about mfix. Wei Hu [35]asked a question about the definition and semantics of mfix, the monadic fix operation. Using fundeps to resolve polymorphic types to concrete types. Bryan Donlan [36]asked a question about the interaction between functional dependencies and type checking, with a rather subtle answer. Best book/tutorial on category theory and its applications. fero [37]asked for recommendations on a book about category theory. Loss of humour. Andrew Coppin [38]laments the loss of some of Haskell's humorous heritage. Blog noise [39]Haskell news from the [40]blogosphere. * Ketil Malde: [41]Updates and other trivialities. * Ulisses Costa: [42]Lex/yacc. A short lex/yacc tutorial. * Luke Plant: [43]Haskell Regex replace. Luke wonders if anyone knows how to do regex replace in Haskell. * Eric Kow (kowey): [44]simple random numbers in Haskell. Eric writes a simple tutorial for the System.Random module. * Jamie Brandon: [45]Week 7 progress (respect my formatting damnit). An update on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project. * Tupil: [46]Formlets in Haskell. * John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [47]Seen in the Haskell wiki. * Ulisses Costa: [48]Type inference. * Dennis Bueno: [49]ICFP Contest 2008 -- The One Liners. Dennis describes his experiences participating in this year's ICFP Programming Contest. * Magnus Therning: [50]More prefixes. * Don Stewart (dons): [51]Haskell: Batteries Included. * >>> Harry Pierson: [52]Monadic Philosophy Part 2 - The LINQ Monad. * >>> Harry Pierson: [53]Monadic Philosophy. Harry begins a series explaining his journey through understanding monads. * Ulisses Costa: [54]Pointfree Calculator. * Eric Kow (kowey): [55]pandoc gets mediawiki support. * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [56]The Fibonacci Numbers, Coalgebraicaly. * Twan van Laarhoven: [57]Solving nonograms. * >>> Ayumilove: [58]Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 2A. * >>> Ayumilove: [59]Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 2B. * >>> Ayumilove: [60]Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 3. * >>> Darren Moffat: [61]T5120 donated to Haskell Community. Sun's donation inspires Darren to get back into Haskell and maybe contribute some code to GHC again, like he did back when he was a student at Glasgow. * Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson (DrSyzygy): [62]Blackbox computing of A-infinity algebras. The last results from Mikael's thesis have made it into article form, and are [63]available on the arXiv. * John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [64]OSCon Update. * Real-World Haskell: [65]Beta availability hiccups. * John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [66]First 2 Days of OSCon. John reports live from OSCon. * Neil Mitchell: [67]GSoC Hoogle: Week 9. An update on Neil's Google Summer of Code project. * Patrick Perry: [68]Addressing Haskell BLAS Performance Issues. Patrick's Haskell BLAS bindings are now significantly sped up, and he explains what made the difference. * Arnar Birgisson (Arnar): [69]Parsing annotated postfix operators with Haskell. Arnar exhibits a neat pattern for constructing certain types of parsers, which makes essential use of first-class functions. Quotes of the Week * mauke: a hint to beginners: typing 'fix error' in ghci does not have the intended effect. * mauke: Hungarian Notation constructs a type system in the mind of the programmer. * rwbarton: I was hoping for a pile of Functors. * Baughn: [on lambdabot] Yes, PMS is a real issue. Poor memory size, that is. * Cale: There should be a website called "Static Equilibrium or Not" where you rate pictures according to whether you think the depicted objects are in static equilibrium. * sahko: xmonad is an ancient african word for "you dont need to use a mouse fool". * doidydoidy: Category theory is exactly like a comic book alternative universe, except they use the prefix "co-" instead of "bizarro". 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. Headlines are available as [75]PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [76]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [77]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9691 3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42671 4. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel 5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42643 6. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/RandomDotOrg 7. http://random.org/ 8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42629 9. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/mueval 10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16360 11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42582 12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16355 13. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Hipmunk 14. http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Chipmunk 15. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/HipmunkPlayground 16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42534 17. http://quantile95.com/2008/07/24/addressing-haskell-blas-performance-issues/ 18. http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~patperry/code/blas/ 19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42548 20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42545 21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42502 22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/interleavableIO 23. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-July/028501.html 24. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008 25. http://code.haskell.org/hoogle/ 26. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-9.html 27. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-7-progress-respect-my-formatting.h... 28. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hpysics 29. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell 30. http://code.haskell.org/~Saizan/cabal 31. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c/wiki/ 32. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApiStatus 33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/14800 34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9672 35. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42677 36. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42639 37. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42616 38. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42510 39. http://planet.haskell.org/ 40. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 41. http://blog.malde.org/index.php/2008/07/31/updates-and-other-trivialities/ 42. http://caos.di.uminho.pt/~ulisses/blog/2008/07/31/lexyacc/ 43. http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog.php?id=1107301690 44. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/07/simple-random-numbers-in-haskell.html 45. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-7-progress-respect-my-formatting.h... 46. http://blog.tupil.com/formlets-in-haskell/ 47. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/736-Seen-in-the-Haskell-wiki.html 48. http://caos.di.uminho.pt/~ulisses/blog/2008/07/30/type-inference/ 49. http://obfuscatedcode.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/icfp-contest-2008-the-one-lin... 50. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/355 51. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2008/07/29#batteries 52. http://devhawk.net/2008/07/30/Monadic+Philosophy+Part+2+The+LINQ+Monad.aspx 53. http://devhawk.net/2008/07/30/Monadic+Philosophy.aspx 54. http://caos.di.uminho.pt/~ulisses/blog/2008/07/29/pointfree-calculator/ 55. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/07/pandoc-gets-mediawiki-support.html 56. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/07/fibonacci-numbers-coalgebraicaly.html 57. http://twan.home.fmf.nl/blog/haskell/Nonograms.details 58. http://www.5min.com/Video/-Ayumilove-Haskell-Programming-Tutorial-Part-2-A-3... 59. http://www.5min.com/Video/Ayumilove-Haskell-Programming-Tutorial-Part-2-B-31... 60. http://www.5min.com/Video/Ayumilove-Haskell-Programming-Tutorial-Part-3-3185... 61. http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/t5120_donated_to_haskell_community 62. http://blog.mikael.johanssons.org/archive/2008/07/blackbox-computing-of-a-in... 63. http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3869 64. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/733-OSCon-Update.html 65. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/07/16/beta-availability-hiccups/ 66. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/732-First-2-Days-of-OSCon.html 67. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-9.html 68. http://quantile95.com/2008/07/24/addressing-haskell-blas-performance-issues/ 69. http://www.hvergi.net/2008/07/parsing-annotated-postfix-operators-with-haske... 70. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 71. http://sequence.complete.org/ 72. http://planet.haskell.org/ 73. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 74. http://haskell.org/ 75. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/archives/20080731.pdf 76. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 77. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/