Dear Haskellers, another six months have passed, and another change of editor has occurred. Half a year usually also is plenty of time for several productive changes and news to occur within the Haskell community, and therefore it is time for you to start writing: please contribute to the forthcoming seventh edition of the ================================================================ Haskell Communities & Activities Report http://www.haskell.org/communities/ Submission deadline: 29 October 2004 (please send your contributions to hcar@haskell.org, in plain ASCII or LaTeX format) ================================================================ The Haskell Communities & Activities Report is a bi-annual overview of the state of Haskell as well as Haskell-related projects over the last, and possibly the upcoming 6 months. If you have only recently been exposed to Haskell, it might be a good idea to browse the May 2004 edition -- you will find interesting topics described as well as several starting points and links that may provide answers to many questions. The plan is to collect contributions until roughly the end of October, then start to compile them into a coherent report which will appear during November. As always, this is a great opportunity to update your webpages, make new releases, announce of even start new projects, or to point at some developments you want every Haskeller to see! As the purpose of the report is to collect recent or current activities, we encourage you to update all existing summaries and reports. We will drop any topics that have not had any activity for the past year, i.e., since November 2003, but we would very much prefer you to present an updated description of the topic. Of course, new entries are more than welcome. Reports should generally be kept brief and informative, ranging from a few sentences to a few hundred words, to keep the whole report reasonably sized. Looking forward to your contributions, Andres (current editor) ----------------------------------- topics New suggestions for current hot topics, activities, projects, etc. are welcome - especially with names and addresses of potential contacts, but here is a non-exclusive list of likely topics (see also http://www.haskell.org/communities/topics.html ): General Haskell developments; Haskell implementations; Haskell extensions; Standardization and documentation; Haskell tutorials, howtos and wikis; Organisation of Haskell tool and library development; Haskell-related projects and publications; new research, fancy tools, long-awaited libraries, cool applications; Feedback from specialist mailing lists to the Haskell community as a whole; Haskell announcements; all (recent) things Haskell Announcements: if you've announced anything new on the Haskell list over the last six months, you'll want to make sure that is reflected in this edition! Project pings: if you're maintaining a Haskell tool or library or somesuch, you'll want to let everyone know that it is still alive and actively maintained, even if there have been no new additions, but all the more if there have been new developments. Tutorials: if you've fought with some previously undocumented corner of Haskell, and have been kind enough to write down how you did manage to build that graphical user interface, or if you've written a tutorial about some useful programming techniques, this is your opportunity to spread the word (short, topic-specific, and hands-on tutorials that only show how to achieve a certain practical task would do a lot to make things easier for new Haskellers - please write some!) Applications: if you've been working quietly, using Haskell for some interesting project or application (commercial or otherwise), you might want to let others know about what you're using Haskell for, and about your experiences using the existing tools and libraries; are you using Haskell on your job? An interesting thread about using Haskell and more generally functional programming for non-Haskell things seems to recur with reasonable frequency - why not write a sentence or two about your use of Haskell for our report? Feedback: if you're on one of the many specialist Haskell mailing lists, you'll want to report on whatever progress has been made there (GUI API discussions, library organisation, etc.) If you're unsure whether a contact for your area of work has come forward yet, have a look at the report's potential topics page, or get in touch with me. I have contacted last time's contributors, hoping they will volunteer to provide updates of their reports, and will update the contacts on the topics page fairly regularly. But where you don't yet see contacts listed for your own subject of interest, you are very welcome to volunteer, or to remind your local community/project team/mailing list/research group/etc. that they really ought to get their act together and let the Haskell community as a whole know about what they've been doing! :-) -------------------------- what should I write? That depends on your topic, but as a general rule, it shouldn't take you long. A simple sentence or two about your use of Haskell could go into the "Individual Haskellers and their projects" section. If you're a company, or if you're working on a project using Haskell as the implementation language, a paragraph on that could go into the "Commercial Applications" and "Non-Commercial Applications" sections. A typical summary report about a tool/library/project/application/... would be between 1 and 3 paragraphs of ASCII text (what's it about? major topics and results since the last report? current hot topics? major goals for the next six months?) plus pointers to material for further reading (typically to a home page, or to mailing list archives, specifications and drafts, implementations, meetings, minutes, ...). For those who prefer templates to fill in, the report is edited in LaTeX, and an entry template might look something like this: \subsubsection{<MYSTUFF>} \report{<MY NAME}\\ <WHAT IS IT?> <WHAT IS ITS STATUS? / WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE LAST TIME?> <CAN OTHERS GET IT?> <WHAT ARE THE IMMEDIATE PLANS?> <FURTHER READING> \url{<PROJECT URL>} Browsing through previous editions should give you a good idea of the variety of possibilities, ranging from very brief to extensive. -- Haskell Communities and Activities Report Please send submissions for the 11/2004 edition before 29 October 2004 to <hcar@haskell.org>.