December 2016 - Haskell-community

ANN: New Haskell.org Committee Members
by Gershom B 18 Dec '16

18 Dec '16

Following the self-nomination period and discussion, the Haskell.org committee has selected new members: Full term: * Mitsutoshi Aoe * Jasper Van der Jeugt * Niki Vazou Short term: * Alan Zimmerman As per the rules of the committee, this discussion was held among the current members of the committee, and the outgoing members of the committee who were not seeking reappointment. Thank you to all the many candidates who submitted a self-nomination. We recieved many strong nominations, from a broad range of geographies and backgrounds. The choice amongst them was not easy, and we would encourage all those who nominated themselves to consider self-nominating again in the future. The outgoing members are: Adam Foltzer, Edward Kmett, Andres Loeh, and Nicolas Wu. Thanks all for your service! These are tough shoes to fill, but I have confidence that our incoming members will more than rise to the occasion. Cheers, Gershom

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Summer of Haskell 2016 Wrap-Up
by Gershom B 08 Dec '16

08 Dec '16

We wanted to let folks know what happened with all our Summer of Haskell projects, and thank again all those who donated as individuals or sponsored students to make this possible. As a reminder, the accepted projects were announced on reddit at: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/4kp6zg/summer_of_haskell_2016_acc… * * * 1) Native Metaprogramming in Haskell This very ambitious project made significant progress, though is not yet ready for a full merge into GHC. A talk and paper on work relating to it were presented at the Haskell Implementors Workshop at ICFP, and a page on the GHC wiki describes the current status. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSWoGdfYt68 - https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.04799 - https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/NativeMetaprogramming 2) GHCVM - A JVM Backend for GHC Again, significant progress made on a very ambitious project, which has now been renamed to “eta”. A talk on the work done was given at the HIW, and the project is considered ready for “hobbyist use”. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4m7xFVzd50 - https://github.com/typelead/eta 3) Completing the LLVM backend for Accelerate All operators of the LLVM backend are now implemented, and we’re told that the accelerate-llvm project, already usable, will be get a more proper announcement as ready for widespread use real soon now (tm). - https://github.com/AccelerateHS/accelerate-llvm - https://github.com/AccelerateHS/accelerate-llvm/commits?author=ZihengJiang 4) Hackage Improvements A whole raft of usability improvements to hackage (including the long-awaited rollout of reverse dependency tracking, and a very usable package browser interface) are undergoing final code review and polish in a PR before being rolled out. The student’s blog contains more information about what’s on the way. - http://sooryanarayan.me/blog/hsoc-testimonial/ 5) Derivable Storable and Prim instances This work resulted in both a package (usable today) and a plugin to improve the performance of the derived code. Updates on the decisions made and work done were posted to the numerical-haskell group - https://hackage.haskell.org/package/derive-storable - http://hackage.haskell.org/package/derive-storable-plugin - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/numericalhaskell 6) Visual functional block-based programming language for CodeWorld This work went well and is described on the student’s blog. It is usable today at https://code.world/blocks and apparently has already begun to be integrated into CodeWorld lesson plans. - http://stefanj.me/funblocks/ - https://code.world/blocks 7) Jupyter for GHCJS Apparently this ran into a far amount of difficulties and didn’t make significant progress, though not for lack of effort. The student is anticipated to write up an experience report describing some of the problems encountered and how others might work around them in the future. 8) Live Profiling and Performance Monitoring Server A lot of work was accomplished on various fronts here. A number of changes to the GHC RTS are in review and pending merge. A tool has been written to take advantage of the newly available information. And various other small packages that met needs along the way were extracted and contributed to hackage. A fuller write-up of progress and future work is available at the student’s blog. - https://phabricator.haskell.org/D2522 - https://github.com/NCrashed/live-profile-monitor - http://ncrashed.github.io/blog/posts/2016-09-11-hsoc-results.html * * * Apologies for the delays in assembling this information -- as they say, man plans, the fates laugh. Thanks to all our students for their dedicated work and contributions to the ecosystem. We hope to see much more from all of you in the future. And thanks to all our mentors for donating their time to guide, teach, and make this possible. And a very special thanks to Edward Kmett for co-ordinating much of the administrative work here, as well as fundraising towards this great Summer of Haskell. * * * Sponsors (listed on summer.haskell.org) - haskell.org kicked things off this year by funding a student and organizing the Summer of Haskell. - Awake Networks is building a next generation network security and analytics platform. They are a proud sponsor of the Summer of Haskell and contribute broadly to the Haskell community. - Haskell Book is a proud sponsor of the Summer of Haskell and provides a complete and up-to-date resource for learning Haskell, suitable whether you're completely new to Haskell or are at an intermediate level and want to deepen your understanding. - YOW! Australia is a proud sponsor of the Summer of Haskell and organizes conferences throughout Australia. - Chris Smith volunteered to fund two students to work on CodeWorld in particular. - Edward Kmett and Gershom Bazerman volunteered to personally fund a student project. Best, Gershom Bazerman Haskell.org Committee

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Call for Haskell.org Committee Nominations
by Gershom B 05 Dec '16

05 Dec '16

Dear Haskellers, It is time to put out a call for new nominations (typically but not necessarily self-nominations) to the haskell.org committee. We have four members of our committee due for retirement -- Adam Foltzer, Nicolas Wu, Andres Loeh, and Edward Kmett (who is stepping down early). As per our bylaws, three of the slots will be for regular three year terms, and one will be a short one year term to fill out the remainder of Edward's. To nominate yourself, please send an email to committee at haskell.org by December 2, 2016. The retiring members are eligible to re-nominate themselves. Please feel free to include any information about yourself that you think will help us to make a decision. The Haskell.org committee serves as a board of directors for Haskell.org, a 501(c)3 nonprofit which oversees technical and financial resources related to Haskell community infrastructure. Being a member of the committee does not necessarily require a significant amount of time, but committee members should aim to be responsive during discussions when the committee is called upon to make a decision. Strong leadership, communication, and judgement are very important characteristics for committee members. The role is about setting policy, providing direction/guidance for Haskell.org infrastructure, planning for the long term, and being fiscally responsible with the Haskell.org funds (and donations). As overseers for policy regarding the open source side of Haskell, committee members must also be able to set aside personal or business related bias and make decisions with the good of the open source Haskell community in mind. We seek a broad representation from different segments of the Haskell world -- including but not limited to those focused on education, those focused on industrial applications, those with background in organizing users-groups, and those focused directly on our technical infrastructure. More details about the committee's roles and responsibilities are on https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell.org_committee If you have any questions about the process, please feel free to e-mail us at committee at haskell.org, or contact one of us individually. Best, Gershom Bazerman

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