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NW Functional Programming Interest Group
by Greg Meredith 19 Jul '08

19 Jul '08

All, Apologies for multiple listings. A small cadre of us are organizing a Northwest Functional Programming Interest Group (hey... NWFPIG, that's kinda funny). Our first official meeting is at the The Seattle Public Library 1000 - 4th Ave. Seattle, WA 98104 from 17:00 - 18:00 on February 20th. On the first meeting's agenda we'll be - giving people who are interested in or actively using FP for work or play a chance to meet - seeking to build up a pipeline of presentations and guest speakers - trying to keep organizational mishigosh to a minimum Hope to see you there. Monadically yours, --greg -- L.G. Meredith Managing Partner Biosimilarity LLC 806 55th St NE Seattle, WA 98105 +1 206.650.3740 http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com

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ANN: Haskeline 0.2
by Judah Jacobson 18 Jul '08

18 Jul '08

Hi all, This is to announce the initial (alpha-ish) release of Haskeline, a library for line input in command-line programs. It is similar in purpose to editline or readline, but is written in Haskell and thus (hopefully) more easily used in other Haskell programs. === Links === Hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskeline Development repo: darcs get http://code.haskell.org/haskeline Bug tracking: http://trac.haskell.org/haskeline === Features === - Runs on POSIX-compatible systems, including non-ANSI terminals. - Runs on the native Windows APIs using MinGW (Cygwin support is TODO). - Supports Unicode cross-platform (POSIX is only UTF-8, for now). - Provides a rich user interface, supporting both Emacs and Vi edit modes and customizable in a ~/.haskeline file. - Implements history recall and incremental search. - Allows custom tab completion functions which run in an arbitrary monad. -Judah

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ANN: The Haskell-Beginners Mailing List (beginners@haskell.org)
by Benjamin L.Russell 17 Jul '08

17 Jul '08

On behalf of the many, many contributors to the thread "on starting Haskell-Edu, a new education-related Haskell-related mailing list," I am pleased to announce that The Haskell-Beginners Mailing List Discussion of primarily beginner-level topics related to Haskell beginners(a)haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners has been launched, and is awaiting contributions from readers. This mailing list is for primarily beginner-level discussion about topics related to Haskell. Feel free to ask beginner-level questions, or to discuss beginner-level topics, related to Haskell here. Please don't cross-post to both Haskell and Haskell-Beginners. A brief list of navigational links follows: To subscribe, visit: Beginners Info Page http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners To browse, visit: The Beginners Archives http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/beginners/ To use via Gmane, visit: Gmane -- Mail To News And Back Again -- Information about gmane.comp.lang.haskell.beginners http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.beginners I hope that Haskell-Beginners will be of service to you, and that your time and effort on this list will prove meaningful. May the Lambda-Force of Haskell be with you! Many thanks go to all the people who have contributed to the creation of this mailing list, both directly, by sending in comments and suggestions, and indirectly, by asking beginner questions and discussing beginner topics on Haskell-Cafe. I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I will. -- Benjamin L. Russell

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WLPE'08 - First call for Papers
by WLPE-08 17 Jul '08

17 Jul '08

WLPE'08 -- Call for Papers The 18th Workshop on Logic-based methods in Programming Environments http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/Conferences/WLPE08/ December 9th-13th 2008, Udine, Italy (Satellite Workshop of ICLP 2008) The 18th Workshop on Logic-based methods in Programming Environments will take place in Udine (Italy), as a satellite workshop of ICLP 2008, the 24th International Conference on Logic Programming. This workshop will continue the series of successful international workshops on logic programming environments held in Ohio, USA (1989), Eilat, Israel (1990), Paris, France (1991), Washington D.C., USA (1992), Vancouver, Canada (1993), Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy (1994), Portland, USA (1995), Leuven, Belgium (1997), Las Cruces, USA (1999), Paphos, Cyprus (2001), Copenhagen, Denmark (2002), Mumbai, India (2003), Saint Malo, France (2004), Sitges (Barcelona), Spain (2005), Seattle, USA (2006) and Porto, Portugal (2007). More information about the series of WLPE workshops can be found at http://www.cs.usask.ca/projects/envlop/WLPE/ The workshop aims at providing an informal meeting for researchers working on logic-based methods and tools which support program development and analysis. This year, we plan to continue and consolidate the shift in focus from environmental tools for logic programming to logic-based environmental tools for programming in general, so that this workshop can be possibly interesting for a wider scientific community. In addition to papers describing more conceptual and theoretical work, the call for papers will solicit papers describing the implementation of, and the experience with, such tools. Areas particularly relevant to the workshop include (but are not limited to): - static and dynamic analysis - debugging and testing - program verification and validation - code generation from specifications - termination and non-termination analysis - reasoning on occurs-check freeness and determinacy - profiling and performance analysis - type- and mode analysis - module systems - optimization tools Authors who are interested in taking part in the workshop, but are unsure if their work falls within its scope, are invited to contact the organizers and will be given suitable advice. Workshop Organizers ------------------- Puri Arenas Facultad de Informatica Universidad Complutense de Madrid 28040-Madrid, Spain Email: puri(a)sip.ucm.es Phone: +34 91 394 76 33 Fax: +34 91 336 50 18 http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/puri Damiano Zanardini Facultad de Informatica Universidad PolitÃÂ©cnica de Madrid 28660-Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain Email: damiano(a)clip.dia.fi.upm.es Phone: +34 91 336 74 48 Fax: +34 91 394 75 29 http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/damiano Program Committee ----------------- - Puri Arenas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (ws co-chair) - Michael Codish, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev - Roberta Gori, Universita di Pisa - Arnaud Gotlieb, IRISA/CNRS UMR 6074 - Patricia Hill, University of Leeds - Jacob Howe, City University, London - Sabina Rossi, Universita Ca' Foscari di Venezia - Tom Schrijvers, K.U.Leuven - Alexander Serebrenik, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven - Wim Vanhoof, University of Namur - German Vidal, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia - Damiano Zanardini, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid,(ws co-chair) Important Dates --------------- Submission: September 15th, 2008 (23:59:59 Samoa time (GMT -11)) Notification: October 8th, 2008 Camera-ready: October 26th, 2008 Workshop: TBA (probably Dec 9th or Dec 13th, half-day) Submission ---------- Papers should be submitted to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wlpe2008 The length of papers can range from 2 to 15 pages in LNCS style. Informal proceedings will be distributed at the workshop. After the workshop, proceedings will be available on-line in the Computing Research Repository (CoRR). In addition to papers describing conceptual and theoretical work, papers describing the implementation of and the experience with tools are welcome.

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Haskell Weekly News: Issue 77 - July 16, 2008
by Brent Yorgey 16 Jul '08

16 Jul '08

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080716 Issue 77 - July 16, 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to issue 77 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. Announcements Takusen 0.8.3. Alistair Bayley [2]announced the release of [3]Takusen 0.8.3, with ODBC support, more Cabal improvements, bug fixes, and some basic result-set validation. Launching Haskell Group in Vancouver, Canada. Jon Strait [4]announced that a [5]Haskell Programmers Group has been created in Vancouver; the first meeting is scheduled for next Monday, July 21st. Feel free to join the Google Groups list to be notified of future events, or just show up to a meeting to bounce ideas and questions off of other Haskell programmers. Sphinx full-text searching client on Hackage. Chris Eidhof [6]announced work on a [7]client for the [8]sphinx full-text search engine. Help hacking on it, testing it or improving documentation is welcome. haskell-src-exts 0.3.5. Niklas Broberg [9]announced that the [10]haskell-src-exts package is now updated to understand the current version of Template Haskell syntax. Bug reports welcome. Prime time for Haskell. Janis Voigtlaender [11]announced that Haskell STM is featured in an [12]article in this month's Communications of the ACM. vector 0.1 (efficient arrays with lots of fusion). Roman Leshchinskiy [13]announced an initial release of the [14]vector library, which will eventually provide fast, Int-indexed arrays with a powerful fusion framework. Galois Tech Talks: Stream Fusion for Haskell Arrays. Don Stewart [15]announced that he was giving this week's Galois Tech Talk, on stream fusion for Haskell arrays. The talk was yesterday, July 15, but hopefully some sort of recording or slides will be made available. protocol-buffers. Chris Kuklewicz [16]announced a very early version of the [17]protocol-buffers package, a Haskell interface to Google's newly released [18]data interchange format. GHC IRC meeting. Simon Marlow [19]announced the (first weekly?) IRC meeting to discuss GHC, a scheduled time when the developers turn up on #ghc, discuss current topics around GHC, and users can chime in with questions, points for discussion, complaints and so on. The first meeting took place on July 16 at 1600 BST (UTC +1)/0800 PDT (UTC-7)/1100 EDT (UTC-4), in the #ghc channel on chat.freenode.net; hopefully this will become a weekly event. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 [20]Google Summer of Code. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on [21]improvements to the GHC API. He recently [22]asked for comments on a proposed refactoring to the GHC API, creating a new Ghc monad to capture error handling and single-threaded use of Sessions. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. [23]This week, he wrote a ton of Haddock documentation for GHC internals. He also added the ability for compiler plugins to generate their own source annotations, to allow plugins to use intermediate results from previous plugins. He's currently working on an exciting, secret feature: tune in next week to find out what it is! Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. Jamie is [24]currently working on, tweaking the [25]api, writing tests and writing reference implementations on sorted and unsorted association lists. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on [26]Hoogle 4. [27]This week, he worked on type search and database generation. Next week he plans to finish up type search and release and command-line version. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is [28]working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a [29]physics engine using [30]Data Parallel Haskell. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a [31]make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Libraries Proposals and extensions to the [32]standard libraries. adding split to Data.List. Gwern Branwen [33]proposed adding some split-like functions to Data.List. Will they actually get added this time? Will people be able to agree on one of the seventeen possible sets of semantics? Tune in next time... Discussion GHC API: monad and error handling. Thomas Schilling [34]asked for comments on a proposed refactoring to the GHC API, creating a new Ghc monad to capture error handling and single-threaded use of Sessions. Jobs Research positions on Modeling and Analyzing Software Adaptation, University of Koblenz. Ralf Lammel [35]announced two research positions for a postdoc and a PhD student, available initially for 2 years. The successful applicants will work on the research theme of "ADAPT: Modeling and Analyzing Software Adaptation". The objective of [36]ADAPT is to relate, advance, combine, and challenge adaptation methods and associated methods of modeling and analyzing that are used by the communities of software engineering, programming languages, logic-based modeling, multi-agent systems, formal methods, SOA, web systems, and mobile, autonomous systems. Blog noise [37]Haskell news from the [38]blogosphere. * Real-World Haskell: [39]Real World Haskellers at OSCON next week. John Goerzen and Bryan O'Sullivan will be in Portland, Oregon next week for OSCON (along with Don Stewart, who lives in Portland). * Russell O'Connor: [40]ICFP 2008 Post-Mortem. * Brent Yorgey: [41]Call for an ICFP Mars Server. Will someone make a Mars Server where we can all submit our rovers and new maps, watch them compete, improve them, and generally have fun getting some feedback without bugging the organizing committee? Pretty please? * Jamie Brandon: [42]Week 5 progress. An update on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project. * Brent Yorgey: [43]ICFP programming contest reflections. * >>> Chris Bogart: [44]Help with study of functional programmers. Chris is doing a study as part of a research internship at Microsoft, and is seeking people currently working on a real project in a functional language whom he can observe as part of his study. * >>> eigenclass: [45]Quicksort erratum. A time and space analysis of a classic quicksort implementation in Haskell. * Ralf Lammel: [46]Research positions on Modeling and Analyzing Software Adaptation, University of Koblenz. * Max Bolingbroke: [47]Compiler Plugins For GHC: Week Five. An update on Max's Google Summer of Code project. * Luke Plant: [48]Haskell Blog Rewrite - Session 7. Luke documents setting up CentOS in VirtualBox VM in order to compile Haskell code for a server to which he does not have ssh access. Not for the faint of heart. * Chris Eidhof: [49]Stemming with Haskell. A [50]stemming library and [51]Sphinx client for Haskell. * >>> Duane Johnson: [52]Haskell is Popular on IRC. The large amount of community participation and academic brainshare gives Duane a lot of confidence in Haskell. * >>> Mike Harris: [53]ICFP Programming Contest '08. Mike participated in the ICFP programming contest, and might try porting his solution to Haskell. * Luke Palmer: [54]The Curry-Howard isomorphism and the duality of x and ->. * Magnus Therning: [55]Playing with prefixes. Magnus explores different ways to encode units of storage (bytes, kilobytes, kibibytes...) in Haskell. * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [56]MSFP 2008. * Shin-Cheng Mu: [57]Tail-Recursive, Linear-Time Fibonacci. * Neil Mitchell: [58]GSoC Hoogle: Week 7. * FP Lunch: [59]CCC-ness of the category of containers. * JP Moresmau: [60]instance Data Map where -- half done!. JP writes an Data.Generics.Data instance for Data.Map. * >>> Rick Carback: [61]AutoKey in Haskell. Rick is learning Haskell and has implemented a simple AutoKey cipher. * >>> Jeremy Frens: [62]PE Problem #2 in All Languages (Part II). * Luke Palmer: [63]Required Optimization. Annotations for specifying expected compiler optimizations? * London Haskell Users Group: [64]AngloHaskell 2008. * >>> Justus: [65]random programming. Solving a simple programming challenge in Haskell. Quotes of the Week * Japsu: segfault cat is watching you unsafeCoerce * z0MB13: who can say hello to me as a md5 or decipher what kind of technique can be used to remove the password * denq: [upon experiencing a moment of enlightenment] oh! something bing in my brain :) * Pseudonym: Pseudonym needs codependent types - useful when you're doing dysfunctional programming. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [66]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [67]the Haskell Sequence and [68]Planet Haskell. [69]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [70]haskell.org. Headlines are available as [71]PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [72]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [73]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9570 3. http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/Takusen/0.8.3/Takusen-0.8.3.tar… 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42287 5. http://groups.google.com/group/hugvan 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42263 7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/sphinx 8. http://www.sphinxsearch.com/ 9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42233 10. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskell-src-exts 11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42227 12. http://research.microsoft.com/~larus/Papers/p80-larus.pdf 13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42207 14. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/vector 15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/42196 16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9575 17. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/protocol-buffers 18. http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html 19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/14741 20. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2008 21. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcApiStatus 22. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9589 23. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/?p=69 24. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-5-progress.html 25. http://code.haskell.org/gmap/api 26. http://code.haskell.org/hoogle/ 27. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-7.html 28. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c/wiki/ 29. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hpysics 30. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell 31. http://code.haskell.org/~Saizan/cabal 32. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library_submissions 33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9558 34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/9589 35. http://blogs.msdn.com/ralflammel/archive/2008/07/15/research-positions-on-m… 36. http://adapt.uni-koblenz.de/ 37. http://planet.haskell.org/ 38. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 39. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/07/16/real-world-haskellers-at-os… 40. http://r6.ca/blog/20080716T131235Z.html 41. http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/call-for-an-icfp-mars-server/ 42. http://jamiiecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-5-progress.html 43. http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/icfp-programming-contest-reflection… 44. http://sambangu.blogspot.com/2008/07/help-with-study-of-functional 45. http://eigenclass.org/hiki/quicksort-erratum 46. http://blogs.msdn.com/ralflammel/archive/2008/07/15/research-positions-on-m… 47. http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/07/14/compiler-plugins-for-ghc-week-five/ 48. http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog.php?id=1107301689 49. http://blog.tupil.com/stemming-with-haskell/ 50. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/stemmer 51. http://www.sphinxsearch.com/ 52. http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/14/haskell-is-popular-on-irc/ 53. http://thingsthatmikethinks.blogspot.com/2008/07/icfp-programming-contest-0… 54. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/07/13/ch-isomorphism-duality/ 55. http://therning.org/magnus/archives/354 56. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/07/msfp-2008.html 57. http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~scm/2008/tail-recursive-linear-time-fibonacci/ 58. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/07/gsoc-hoogle-week-7.html 59. http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=108 60. http://jpmoresmau.blogspot.com/2008/07/instance-data-map-where-half-done.ht… 61. http://carback.us/rick/blog/?p=24 62. http://jdfrens.blogspot.com/2008/07/pe-problem-2-in-all-languages-part-ii.h… 63. http://luqui.org/blog/archives/2008/07/10/required-optimization/ 64. http://www.londonhug.net/2008/07/10/anglohaskell-2008/ 65. http://hoostus.blogspot.com/2008/07/random-programming.html 66. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 67. http://sequence.complete.org/ 68. http://planet.haskell.org/ 69. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 70. http://haskell.org/ 71. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/archives/20080716.pdf 72. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 73. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/

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Launching Haskell Group in Vancouver, Canada
by Jon Strait 16 Jul '08

16 Jul '08

For those in Vancouver, a short announcement about the recently created Haskell Programmers Group and a meeting scheduled for next Monday, July 21st. http://groups.google.com/group/hugvan Future group announcements will be posted on this Google Groups site, so feel free to join the group list to be notified of future events or just show up to a meeting to bounce ideas and questions off of other Haskell programmers. Thanks, Jon

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on starting Haskell-Edu, a new education-related Haskell-related mailing list
by Benjamin L. Russell 16 Jul '08

16 Jul '08

I am interested in starting a new mailing list on Haskell.org, aimed mainly at liberal arts teachers and elementary-level learners of Haskell, called "Haskell-Edu: The Haskell Educational Mailing List." This new mailing list would be guided by the principle that Haskell is useful not just in research, but also in teaching programming as part of a liberal arts education, on a par with Scheme. When I suggested the idea of this mailing list to Simon Marlow, the Haskell.org mailing list administrator, he suggested that I post this idea on The Haskell Mailing List, so I am posting it here to ask for feedback. The main purposes of this new (proposed) mailing list would be as follows: 1) To provide a primarily non-research-oriented discussion forum to serve the needs of users wishing to focus on the uses of Haskell in education, such as in high school and in introductory computer science college courses, as opposed to in research. 2) To provide a primarily non-research-oriented discussion forum to serve the needs of non-computer-science students of Haskell who wish to focus on Haskell as a language for learning programming as part of a well-rounded a liberal arts education, as opposed to an engineering/mathematics/science-oriented education. Currently, there are two main Haskell mailing lists: a) The Haskell Mailing List, currently used mainly for announcements and for non-beginner discussions b) The Haskell-Cafe, currently ostensibly used for everything else, but in fact used primarily for serious academic computer-science research-oriented discussion of the language Haskell. Neither mailing list addresses Haskell as a tool for teaching functional programming as part of a liberal arts education, and while The Haskell Cafe is ostensibly responsible for addressing beginner questions, I have witnessed several instances in which new users who were not familiar with the academic culture of The Haskell Cafe have been frowned upon for either posting messages that did not assume enough mathematical background, or for posting messages that were written in a tongue-in-cheek style, and that therefore did not fit into the serious tone of the mailing list. (For example, a few months ago, one poster received a private e-mail message from another poster asking the former not to "pollute" The Haskell-Cafe Mailing List for assuming that screen pixel resolution was somehow related to the precision of an algorithm that picked points randomly from a square in approximating pi. Avoiding this question required the knowledge that screen resolution could be considered independently from the precision of the algorithm itself, but while this point may be elementary to mathematicians and researchers, the poster was not familiar enough with the issue to grasp this immediately, and received the above-mentioned response.) This new mailing list is intended to cover both the issue of teaching Haskell as part of a liberal arts curriculum, and of answering beginner questions about Haskell from students who may not have a sophisticated mathematics background. The primary audience of this new mailing list would be educators and students in a liberal arts curriculum who are interested in studying Haskell for studying functional programming. Currently, the language Scheme is often used in this context (even though Scheme is not a true functional programming language), but Haskell has recently been gaining ground rapidly as a programming language in industry as well, and many students of Haskell may either not have a computer science background, or may not have a sophisticated mathematical background. Posts from such users may tend to irritate serious researchers, who are impatient and hard-pressed for time to find valuable information to aid their research, but may be welcome in a more education-focused context. It would seem that creating a new mailing list, Haskell-Edu, focusing on using Haskell in teaching programming in a liberal arts context, and fielding questions from students in that context, would help increase the scope of Haskell users, and help spread knowledge about Haskell to potential future users in industry. Teachers in a liberal arts curriculum could discuss teaching Haskell in a non-research context, and students of Haskell with a liberal arts-related background would be able to ask elementary questions to educators willing to discuss such questions, without being expected to have a sophisticated mathematical or computer science background. -- Benjamin L. Russell --- On Sat, 6/28/08, Simon Marlow <marlowsd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > From: Simon Marlow <marlowsd(a)gmail.com> > Subject: Re: on starting a new Haskell-related mailing list > To: "Benjamin L. Russell" <dekudekuplex(a)yahoo.com> > Cc: "John Peterson" <jpeterson(a)western.edu> > Date: Saturday, June 28, 2008, 4:20 AM > Hi Benjamin, > > Normally we create new mailing lists when the new list has > a narrow > focus and covers a clearly unoccupied niche. In this case > you're > proposing a list that is very broad, and so I think it > needs discussion > amongst the community before we create the list, so that we > can keep a > consistent strategy. > > That's not to say that I disagree with your proposal. > But it doesn't > seem immediately clear what the focus would be, and why > haskell-cafe > shouldn't serve the purpose. One thing that isn't > clear is whether the > list you're proposing is for people interested in > *teaching* Haskell (in > which case I'd say it's a great idea), or people > *learning* Haskell (in > which case I'd consider carefully whether haskell-cafe > shoudn't be > serving that need). That's something you need to > clarify when proposing > this list to the community. > > So I suggest you send this proposal out to > haskell(a)haskell.org in the > first instance, and see what response you get. Discussion > should move > to haskell-cafe quickly. > > Cheers, > Simon > > Benjamin L. Russell wrote: > > Greetings, > > > > John Peterson suggested that I send you an e-mail > message requesting you to perform set-up of a new > Haskell-related mailing list that I plan to > moderate/administrate, since he said that you are the > administrator of the mailing lists on Haskell.org. > > > > My name is Benjamin L. Russell, and I am interested in > starting a new mailing list on Haskell, which I plan to call > Haskell-Edu, specifically devoted to non-research > beginner-level educational matters, guided by the > philosophy that Haskell should be more accessible to > non-computer science major students. > > > > This topic is not covered by any of the other mailing > lists. I have regularly read both Haskell and Haskell-Cafe > for the past six months or so, but the former is devoted to > announcements, and the latter de facto to research matters. > Also, the general tone of Haskell-Cafe is overly academic > and research-oriented, and I feel that this creates an > unnecessary learning curve for non-computer science majors > interested in learning Haskell. > > > > Since John Peterson recommended that I request you to > set-up the mailing list on Haskell.org, could you please > set it whenever you have free time, as follows: > > > > Name of Mailing List: Haskell-Edu > > E-mail Address: haskell-edu(a)haskell.org > > Description: The Haskell-Edu Mailing List: > Discussion About Non-research Issues on Haskell in > Education > > > > Could you please advise me on what I need to do to > start this mailing list? Should I host it on haskell.org, > or just start it by myself using a non-Haskell.org mailing > list service? Also, how should I have it listed in the > "www.haskell.org Mailing Lists" > (http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo) page for the > benefit of other members of the Haskell community? > > > > Thank you very much for your time and cooperation. > > > > Sincerely yours, > > > > Benjamin L. Russell > > > > --- On Fri, 6/27/08, John Peterson > <jpeterson(a)western.edu> wrote: > > > >> From: John Peterson <jpeterson(a)western.edu> > >> Subject: RE: on starting a new Haskell-related > mailing list > >> To: "Benjamin L. Russell" > <dekudekuplex(a)yahoo.com> > >> Date: Friday, June 27, 2008, 12:05 AM > >> Hi Benjamin, > >> > >> There's no problem starting a new mailing > list. Simon > >> Marlow is the administrator of our lists - if you > drop him > >> and email he'll do the setup for Haskell.org. > Once the > >> list is going, you can go into the wiki and add it > to the > >> appropriate pages. > >> > >> We've had a bunch of these special interest > lists and > >> most of them go dead after a few months but you > never know > >> ... > >> > >> > >> John > > > > --- On Thu, 6/26/08, Benjamin L. Russell > <dekudekuplex(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > > > >> From: Benjamin L. Russell > <dekudekuplex(a)yahoo.com> > >> Subject: on starting a new Haskell-related mailing > list > >> To: "John Peterson" > <jpeterson(a)western.edu> > >> Date: Thursday, June 26, 2008, 4:37 PM > >> Greetings, > >> > >> My name is Benjamin L. Russell, and I am > interested in > >> starting a new mailing list on Haskell, which I > plan to > >> call Haskell-Edu, specifically devoted to > non-research > >> beginner-level educational matters, guided by the > >> philosophy that Haskell should be more accessible > to > >> non-computer science major students. (This > message is > >> being addressed to you because I had already sent > the > >> portion below twice to other administrators at > Haskell.org, > >> first to mailman-owner(a)haskell.org, and then to > >> simonmarhaskell(a)gmail.com, but had not received a > response > >> on either occasion.) > >> > >> This topic is not covered by any of the other > mailing > >> lists. I have regularly read both Haskell and > Haskell-Cafe > >> for the past six months or so, but the former is > devoted to > >> announcements, and the latter de facto to research > matters. > >> Also, the general tone of Haskell-Cafe is overly > academic > >> and research-oriented, and I feel that this > creates an > >> unnecessary learning curve for non-computer > science majors > >> interested in learning Haskell. > >> > >> Could you please advise me on what I need to do to > start > >> this mailing list? Should I host it on > haskell.org, or > >> just start it by myself using a non-Haskell.org > mailing > >> list service? Also, how should I have it listed > in the > >> "www.haskell.org Mailing Lists" > >> (http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo) page for > the > >> benefit of other members of the Haskell community? > >> > >> Thank you very much for your time and cooperation. > >> > >> Sincerely yours, > >> > >> Benjamin L. Russell

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Re: [Haskell] Re: on starting Haskell-Edu, a new education-related Haskell-related mailing list
by Benjamin L. Russell 14 Jul '08

14 Jul '08

--- On Mon, 7/14/08, Angelos Sphyris <knightofmathematics(a)hol.gr> wrote: > From: Angelos Sphyris <knightofmathematics(a)hol.gr> > Subject: Re: [Haskell] Re: on starting Haskell-Edu,a new education-related Haskell-related mailing list > To: "Benjamin L.Russell" <DekuDekuplex(a)Yahoo.com> > Date: Monday, July 14, 2008, 6:40 PM > I would avoid help(a)haskell.org as that seems to me to > suggest a general help > archive/source complete with manuals, faqs, examples etc. > > How about arche(a)haskell.org ? > Arche is Greek for 'start', 'beginning'. It > is used in the word 'hierarchy' > and is suitably short, as well as being original. > > Angelos Sphyris While this is an excellent name in itself--short, original, and intellectual, fitting the nature of the list--it would seem to suggest some (albeit heretofore nonexistent) alternative library named "Arche" for Haskell for readers unfamiliar with this name. The main problem is that, by itself, the name doesn't ring a bell for readers unfamiliar with Greek etymology, and seems to be a very creative name for some Haskell tool. Nevertheless, because this name is so original, I am forwarding it to the Haskell mailing list as a reference. I would alternatively suggest alpha(a)haskell.org (the beginning) for beginners, and omega(a)haskell.org (the end) for teachers. -- Benjamin L. Russell

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ANN: Takusen 0.8.3
by Alistair Bayley 11 Jul '08

11 Jul '08

Changes since 0.8.1 (I put 0.8.2 up on hackage with an error in Setup.hs, so it's been skipped): - ODBC support: datetime marshalling is improved. For bind parameters this uses the timestamp struct for most back-ends, but String for MS SQL Server because populating the timestamp struct always failed. - more Cabal improvements: now uses configurations, so the Setup.hs script should be both simpler and more robust. Requires Cabal >= 1.4. Oracle backend on Linux should build nicely. - bug fix for a resource leak if an exception was thrown when initiating a query (the Statement handle was not closed). - some basic result-set validation against the iteratee: if you try to fetch a column that is not in the result-set, an error is thrown (rather than garbage returned). The release bundle: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/Takusen/0.8.3/Takusen-0.8.3.tar… The latest code: darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/takusen Docs: http://darcs.haskell.org/takusen/doc/html/index.html A comprehensive description of API usage can be found in the documentation for module Database.Enumerator (look for the Usage section): http://darcs.haskell.org/takusen/doc/html/Database-Enumerator.html Future plans: - Output bind-parameters and multiple-result sets for ODBC - FreeTDS backend (Sybase and MS Sql Server) - support for Blobs and Clobs For those of you unfamiliar with Takusen, here is our HCAR blurb: Takusen is a DBMS access library. Like HSQL and HDBC, we support arbitrary SQL statements (currently strings, extensible to anything that can be converted to a string). Takusen's 'unique-selling-point' is safety and efficiency. We statically ensure all acquired database resources - such as cursors, connection and statement handles - are released, exactly once, at predictable times. Takusen can avoid loading the whole result set in memory, and so can handle queries returning millions of rows in constant space. Takusen also supports automatic marshalling and unmarshalling of results and query parameters. These benefits come from the design of query result processing around a left-fold enumerator. Currently we fully support ODBC, Oracle, Sqlite, and PostgreSQL.

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topics vs lists
by Claus Reinke 10 Jul '08

10 Jul '08

[third attempt to avoid being blocked with: "Message has a suspicious header":-(] >> it's not obvious to me that both of those needs should be served by a >> single list. I believe it's important that the mailing lists served >> by haskell.org should have clear non-overlapping topics. For those cases where it isn't clear yet whether a spin-off mailing list would survive, for partially overlapping topics, and for those cases where a good idea didn't work out (haskell@), perhaps Mailman's topic filters are an option? Quick summary: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2007-August/058042.html List Member Manual http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/node29.html The idea being that beginners and overloaded advanced list members are in the same boat - they want to see the stuff relevant to them, not the whole flood of messages. For the latter, we currently have haskell@ (discussion starters and announcements), which doesn't quite work as intended, as haskell-cafe@ is the list to use if you want to see responses. So discussions start on haskell-cafe@ anyway, and announcements get copied to both lists.. There have been suggestions to rename haskell@ to haskell-announce@, but whether that would help? If topic filters were used instead, we could recommend: - current haskell@-only users: subscribe to haskell-cafe, topic [ANN] only; will keep your volume low - beginners: subscribe to haskell-cafe, topics [ANN] and [beginner] (is there a way to make that the default topic selection for new subscribers?); will protect you from confusing advanced discussions, until you feel ready for or curious about them - current haskell-cafe@ and haskell@ users: you can drop your subscription for haskell@ - current haskell-cafe@ users: just keep reading everything, or use the topics system to filter out some topics; might also get some haskell-cafe@-dropouts back?-) The [beginner] topic regex would have to cover newbie, etc, but I guess it could grow with time. If a topic really takes off, there'd be clear evidence for a new list, but seasonal topics, like [databases], [web], [arts], etc, could simply remain in the main list, reducing the need to garbage collect old unused lists. That is all assuming that this stuff works as advertized, and that managing topics isn't more work for our list admins than managing lists!-) Claus

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