GHC

Haskell Weekly News: August 13, 2008 Welcome to issue 81 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. This week saw some interesting talks at AngloHaskell, and some cool new packages to hit Hackage, like Language.C ... [More] , AERN-Real, FTGL, and Hoogle. What are you waiting for? Get out there and build something! Announcements Initial release of Language.C (language-c-0.3). Benedikt Huber announced the first release of Language.C, a library for analysing and generating C code. This release features a reasonably well tested parser, a pretty printer, and a preview of the analysis framework. darcs roadmap. Jason Dagit wrote to the list to thank everyone for their support for darcs, and to announce a webpage with a roadmap for future darcs features. Darcs is alive and well! Anglo Haskell 2008 -- slides and audio. Matthew Sackman announced that slides and audio from Anglo Haskell 2008 are now available. BLAS bindings for haskell, version 0.5. Patrick Perry announced a new release of the Haskell BLAS bindings, including a number of new features and improvements. Tutorial on information visualization and visual analytics in Haskell. Jefferson Heard announced the tutorial he will be presenting at DEFUN 2008, to give everyone a sneak peek at the long version of the tutorial before he's done with it. Comments and questions are welcome and encouraged. interval and polynomial enclosure arithmetics. Michal Konecny announced the release of the AERN-Real and AERN-RnToRm packages, which model and reasonably efficiently implement exact real arithmetic. FTGL 1.0. Portable truetype font rendering in OpenGL. Jefferson Heard announced the release of Haskell bindings to FTGL, an easy to use library for portable rendering of TrueType fonts in OpenGL. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 Google Summer of Code. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. This week, he gave a talk at AngloHaskell. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. This week, he announced the first release of the Language.C package. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4. This week, he released several command-line versions and a web version of Hoogle 4, updated the manual, and gave a talk at AngloHaskell. Next week, he plans to work on generating better Hoogle databases, and some bug fixes. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell. This week, he added complete support for general polyhedra, and fixed some bugs in the collision handler. He also added support for bounding spheres, although the results so far are disappointing, due to delays in the GHC implementation of parallel arrays. Next week, he plans to implement static bodies and BSP trees. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Blog noise Haskell news from the blogosphere. >>> Nicholas Lativy: Haskell in less than five minutes. Nicholas refreshes his memory of Haskell. Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Monoid use. Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 11-12. Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Combinatory Birds as Types. Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Getting Better, part ][. Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 11. Max Bolingbroke: Compiler Plugins AngloHaskell Talk. London Haskell Users Group: Video: Paradise, a DSEL for Derivatives Pricing. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach): Compiling GHC. Roman records his experiences building the latest development version of GHC. Luke Palmer: Mindfuck: The Reverse State Monad. Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 0. Joachim Breitner: Xmonad on my mobile phone. Luke Palmer: Composable Input for Fruit. >>> Louis: A Gentle Introduction to Haskell. Louis is learning Haskell by working through the Gentle Introduction. >>> Bryan St. Amour: Some Project Euler. Bryan learns some Haskell the good old-fashioned way---by solving Project Euler problems. Magnus Therning: TagSoup, meet Parsec!. Magnus uses Parsec to parse streams of tags. Thomas M. DuBuisson: hsXenCtrl and pureMD5. Alpheccar: Haskell, iPhone and Biotech. >>> codeflow: About AI and neural networks. codeflow implements neural networks in Haskell for some soccer-playing AI software. >>> Vincent Kriek: And the winner is.... Vincent decides to stick with xmonad. >>> Matthew Trinneer: A New Paradigm - Haskell and HAppS. Quotes of the Week Anatoly Yakovenko: theory doesn't scare me. i am using haskell after all, so i am used to reading long winded papers. bwr: mapM_ putStrLn$reverse[( )([1..y-30]>>" ")$concat$map([" "," /", " -", " \\"]!!)[(foldr(.)(scanl( )1)([1..y]>>[scanl( )0])[2..]!!(2*(1 y) x))`mod`4|x<-[-y-2..59-y*2]]|y<-[30..61]] About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . [Less]

Haskell Weekly News: August 06, 2008 Welcome to issue 80 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. Community News Brent Yorgey (byorgey, your friendly neighborhood HWN editor) has completed a move to Philadelphia and ... [More] looks forward to starting a PhD in the programming languages group at U Penn next month. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) won second prize at the 2008 International Mathematics Competition! Announcements prof2dot, version 0.4.1. Gregory Wright announced the release of prof2dot, a graphical profiling tool for use with GHC. prof2dot is a filter that takes the profiling output generated by running a GHC-compiled program with the " RTS -pix -RTS", option and turns it into a graphviz dot file. GHC switching to git. Simon Marlow announced that the GHC team has made the decision to switch the version control system hosting the GHC repository from darcs to git. Haddock 2.2.1. David Waern announced the release of version 2.2.1 of Haddock, the Haskell documentation tool. Haskore tutorial. jinjing is creating a Haskore tutorial while learning it. Suggestions and corrections are welcome. Hoogle 4 beta. Neil Mitchell announced the availability of beta versions of Hoogle 4, both a web client and command-line version. Testing and feedback welcome! Design your own xmonad shirt. David Lazar has prepared a design on spreadshirt under Designs > Computer > Programming. Choose the color and other formatting and get your very own custom xmonad shirt! Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 Google Summer of Code. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. This week, he has worked on implementing AVL trees and has created several more benchmarks. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4. This week, he finished up type search, which now gives much better results than Hoogle 3. He also released a public beta version of the command-line interface. Bug reports or feature requests are welcome. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell. Last week, he won second prize at the 2008 International Mathematics Competition; while he was away he also found time to read several papers on broad phase collision detection and to begin thinking about general convex polyhedra. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API. Discussion poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?. Eric Kow (kowey) asked how the darcs team could better encourage more people to contribute, precipitating a long and productive discussion with many good suggestions. Jobs Lectureship in Functional Programming, Nottingham. Graham Hutton announced an opening for a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Functional Programming Lab in Nottingham, a recently formed research group that comprises Thorsten Altenkirch, Graham Hutton, Henrik Nilsson, four research fellows, and eleven PhD students. Applications from the Haskell community are encouraged! The closing date for applications is Friday, 15th August 2008. Blog noise Haskell news from the blogosphere. Roman Cheplyaka: Physics and polyhedra. Chris Done: Kibro: Haskell, lighttpd and fastcgi. Neil Mitchell: Hoogle 4.0 web client preview. >>> Sven Heyll: Lazy Evaluation (there be dragons and basement cats). Clifford Beshers: Two-dimensional zip. Brent Yorgey: Philadelphia!. Luke Plant: Haskell API docs suck. A lot.. Neil Mitchell: Hoogle 4.0 release (beta, command line). Mikael Johansson (Syzygy-): The end of the line. Jamie Brandon: Yet more mini benchmarks. Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Combinators in Haskell. Holumbus: Search Packages. Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): How do I get better?. Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 10. Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Hopf Algebra = Group Monad. >>> Ayumilove: Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 4. Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Trivial Monad solutions. Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Trivial Monad solutions (cont.). Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): Orators' exercise. Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 9-10. Matthew Sackman: Reflections on the ICFP Programming Contest 2008. Jamie Brandon: More benchmarks. Chris Done: GHCi on Acid (GOA). Audrey Tang: Pugs now builds again from SVN.. "FP Lunch": An ad-hoc approach to productive definitions. Ketil Malde: A plan for Bloom filters. Audrey Tang: Pugs.hs is back.. Holumbus: OpenSearch Available Again. Quotes of the Week shepheb: don't forget YMCArray matthew-_: you know I increasingly think I'm a very bad haskell programmer - I spend all my time programming at the type level, which is basically untyped. So I just write untyped programs, that happen to run at compile time. SyntaxNinja: just picture monads as tiny, silly, luminous, and devious sprites who fly around your haskell code carrying state from one piece of code to another. I don't think that'll help, but it can't hurt. poetix: Avoiding lambdas is pointless <-- *groan* kzm: My program contains a bug. How ungrateful, after all I've done for it. sw17ch: FunPtrs do not live up to their name About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. Headlines are available as PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . [Less]

Haskell Weekly News: July 31, 2008 Welcome to issue 79 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. Apologies for the slightly late issue this week, attributable to a combination of having to transfer all my files onto a ... [More] 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 announced two new Get-like monads for binary data, with a number of additional features. #haskell irc channel reaches 500 users. Don Stewart announced that 6 1/2 years after its inception, under the guiding hand of Shae Erisson (aka shapr), the #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 announced the release of the RandomDotOrg package, an interface to the random.org random number generator. Mueval 0.3.1, 0.4, 0.4.5, 0.4.6, 0.5. Gwern Branwen announced a number of releases of 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 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 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 announced the availability of Hipmunk, containing bindings for the Chipmunk 2D physics engine, and 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 announced that he has largely closed the C performance gap with his recent Haskell BLAS bindings. Expect a new release shortly. FPers in Northwest Arkansas?. Nathan Bloomfield 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 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 announced a package, interleavableIO, based on Jules Bean (quicksilver)'s monadic tunneling code. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 Google Summer of Code. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4. 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. 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 physics engine using 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 make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API. Discussion Build system woes. Roman Leshchinskiy began a discussion on Cabal and GHC's new build system, with some suggestions for improving the process. Syb Renovations? Issues with Data.Generics. Claus Reinke brought up a number of issues with Data.Generics, with suggestions for improvement. A question about mfix. Wei Hu 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 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 asked for recommendations on a book about category theory. Loss of humour. Andrew Coppin laments the loss of some of Haskell's humorous heritage. Blog noise Haskell news from the blogosphere. Ketil Malde: Updates and other trivialities. Ulisses Costa: Lex/yacc. A short lex/yacc tutorial. Luke Plant: Haskell Regex replace. Luke wonders if anyone knows how to do regex replace in Haskell. Eric Kow (kowey): simple random numbers in Haskell. Eric writes a simple tutorial for the System.Random module. Jamie Brandon: Week 7 progress (respect my formatting damnit). An update on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project. Tupil: Formlets in Haskell. John Goerzen (CosmicRay): Seen in the Haskell wiki. Ulisses Costa: Type inference. Dennis Bueno: ICFP Contest 2008 -- The One Liners. Dennis describes his experiences participating in this year's ICFP Programming Contest. Magnus Therning: More prefixes. Don Stewart (dons): Haskell: Batteries Included. >>> Harry Pierson: Monadic Philosophy Part 2 - The LINQ Monad. >>> Harry Pierson: Monadic Philosophy. Harry begins a series explaining his journey through understanding monads. Ulisses Costa: Pointfree Calculator. Eric Kow (kowey): pandoc gets mediawiki support. Dan Piponi (sigfpe): The Fibonacci Numbers, Coalgebraicaly. Twan van Laarhoven: Solving nonograms. >>> Ayumilove: Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 2A. >>> Ayumilove: Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 2B. >>> Ayumilove: Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 3. >>> Darren Moffat: 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): Blackbox computing of A-infinity algebras. The last results from Mikael's thesis have made it into article form, and are available on the arXiv. John Goerzen (CosmicRay): OSCon Update. Real-World Haskell: Beta availability hiccups. John Goerzen (CosmicRay): First 2 Days of OSCon. John reports live from OSCon. Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 9. An update on Neil's Google Summer of Code project. Patrick Perry: 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): 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 the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. Headlines are available as PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . [Less]

Haskell Weekly News: July 23, 2008 Welcome to issue 78 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. Issue 78: In Which Michi and Neil Become Doctors, Sun Donates Some Sweet Loot, and Jules Is Revealed To Be A Helpful ... [More] Anthropomorphic Robot Community News Congratulations are in order this week to two members of the community who have completed PhDs. Neil Mitchell (ndm) passed his PhD viva last week, subject to minor corrections. Mikael Johansson (Syzygy-) has also completed his PhD and will soon be starting a postdoc at Stanford with the topology in computer science working group. Congratulations, Drs. Mitchell and Johansson! Announcements rosezipper. Eric Kow (kowey) announced the release of rosezipper, Krasimir Angelov and Iavor S. Diatchki's Data.Tree implementation of zippers. list-extras 0.1.0. wren ng thornton (koninkje) announced the initial release of list-extras, a home for common not-so-common list functions. Sun Microsystems and Haskell.org joint project on OpenSPARC. Duncan Coutts (dcoutts) announced a joint project between Sun Microsystems and the Haskell.org community to exploit the high performance capabilities of Sun's latest multi-core OpenSPARC systems via Haskell! Sun has donated a powerful 8 core SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server to the Haskell community, and $10,000 to fund a student to further develop support for high performance Haskell on the SPARC. The student will work with a mentor from Haskell.org and an adviser from Sun's SPARC compiler team. If you're a student and this sounds interesting to you, send in those applications!! Hayoo! beta 0.2. Timo B. announced the second beta release of Hayoo!, a Haskell API search engine providing advanced features like suggestions, find-as-you-type, fuzzy queries and much more. The major change in this release is the inclusion of all packages available on Hackage in the index. Haskell-beginners mailing list. Benjamin L. Russell announced the creation of the Haskell-Beginners Mailing List, beginners at haskell.org, devoted to discussion of primarily beginner-level topics related to Haskell. It's already off to a great start, so if you're a Haskell beginner, or someone interested in answering beginner questions, please subscribe! Haskeline 0.2. Judah Jacobson announced 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. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 Google Summer of Code. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. This week, he ran QuickCheck on his test suite for the first time, and found a large number of failing tests! He's got his work cut out for him straightening those out over the next few days. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell. This week, he implemented full handling of rigid body collisions, including angular velocity. Next he plans to explore various ways to make the engine faster, including broad-phase collision detection. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. This week, he revealed his "mystery project": an HTML pretty-printer for GHC core! Here is a sample. Now his focus turns to tidying things up and solidifying documentation in preparation for getting his patches merged into GHC HEAD. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4. This week, he fleshed out the final part of type search, including support for instances and alpha renaming of variables. Unfortunately, it uses too much memory to be feasibly run on the base libraries! Neil has some ideas on how to fix this, however, which he plans to tackle next week. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. He has finally completed a working implementation for analysing declarations and definitions, and presents a working example of the library's use. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API. Libraries Proposals and extensions to the standard libraries. generalize mapAccumL/R. Ross Paterson proposed adding generalized versions of mapAccumL and mapAccumR to Data.Traversable. signal-handling API. Simon Marlow proposed a new signal-handling API. Discussion Point-free style in guards. L29Ah asked a question about using a points-free style in guard expressions, leading to a number of clever suggestions involving custom combinators. Optimizing sequence. Gracjan Polak started a discussion on the strictness properties of the sequence function, and its implications for optimization. It sounds as though adding an alternate strict version of sequence to the libraries could be a good idea. Blog noise Haskell news from the blogosphere. Eric Kow (kowey): rose zipper on hackage. Eric has uploaded an implementation of a zipper for Data.Tree to hackage. Jamie Brandon: QuickCheck strikes again. An update on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project. Lots of failing QuickCheck tests mean Jamie has his work cut out for him. >>> Ayumilove: Haskell Programming Tutorial Part 1. A video introduction to Haskell? Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach): Status report: week 7-8. An update on Roman's Google Summer of Code project. Conal Elliott (conal): Designing for the future. Benedikt Huber (visq): Language.C: Analysing Definitions. An update on Benedikt's Google Summer of Code project. Max Bolingbroke: Compiler Plugins For GHC: Week Six. An update on Max's Google Summer of Code project. Arnar Birgisson (Arnar): Playing with Haskell's lazy lists. Arnar implements Eric Rowland's simple prime-generating recurrence using lazy lists in Haskell. Neil Mitchell (ndm): GSoC Hoogle: Week 8. An update on Neil's Google Summer of Code project. Matthew Sackman: What is the point?. Matthew had his submission rejected from the Haskell Symposium, and isn't happy about it. Tupil: Stemming with Haskell reloaded. An updated, more functional/Haskellish interface to the stemmer library. Luke Palmer (luqui): Semantic Design. Luke's reflections on a design approach learned from Conal Elliott. Muad`Dib (vixey): Rascal - Mini-haskell like language. Jeremy Shaw: HTML Templating in HAppS using HSP. Jeremy writes a very cool introduction/tutorial to using HSP (Haskell Server Pages) with HAppS. >>> Duane Johnson: Lazy Evaluation at Work. Duane likes the idea of lazy file I/O. >>> Duane Johnson: A Glimmer of Monadic Hope. Duane figures out do-notation. >>> Duane Johnson: Using 'foldr' in Haskell. Duane figures out how to define ( ) and concat in terms of foldr. Mikael Johansson (Syzygy-): Dr rer nat, Magna cum laude. >>> Holden Karau: Integrating your HUnit (or other) tests into your cabal package. Real-World Haskell: Beta availability hiccups. >>> Antoine Hersen: ICFP 2008 Postmortem. Edward Kmett (edwardk): A Sort of Difference. Edward uses an analysis of quicksort in Haskell as a jumping-off point for an introduction to difference lists. Ralf Lammel: The Expression Lemma -- Explained. Ralf explains the relationship between OOP and FP. >>> Greg McClure: Learning languages through problem-solving. Greg extols the virtues of Project Euler for learning new languages, and exhibits a solution to the first problem in Haskell, Erlang, and Python. Quotes of the Week kryptiskt: my point is that our brain isn't some logic machine, it's a jury-rigged contraption to help us get food, friends and sex. It's the Perl of intelligences. Fallacy: peyton `simon` jones Quadrescence: [on #haskell] Well, the nice population here attracts people. Unlike other pla_C_es. How'd those underscores get there? mauke: hmm, regexes get even more cryptic after z-encoding: ZLz3fUZCZLz3fUzlznzrwZRZLz3fUzezrwZRzbZLz3fUzlzezrwZRZLz3fUznzrwZRZR BMeph: Haskell: Where even the newest newcomer acts monadically: join :: ask (ask something) -> ask something Quadrescence: quicksilver: You must be an anthropomorphic robot or something. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. Headlines are available as PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . [Less]

Haskell Weekly News: July 16, 2008 Welcome to issue 77 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. Announcements Takusen 0.8.3. Alistair Bayley announced the release of Takusen 0.8.3, with ODBC support, more ... [More] Cabal improvements, bug fixes, and some basic result-set validation. Launching Haskell Group in Vancouver, Canada. Jon Strait announced that a 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 announced work on a client for the sphinx full-text search engine. Help hacking on it, testing it or improving documentation is welcome. haskell-src-exts 0.3.5. Niklas Broberg announced that the 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 announced that Haskell STM is featured in an article in this month's Communications of the ACM. vector 0.1 (efficient arrays with lots of fusion). Roman Leshchinskiy announced an initial release of the 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 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 announced a very early version of the protocol-buffers package, a Haskell interface to Google's newly released data interchange format. GHC IRC meeting. Simon Marlow 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 Google Summer of Code. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API. He recently 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. 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 currently working on, tweaking the api, writing tests and writing reference implementations on sorted and unsorted association lists. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4. 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 working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Libraries Proposals and extensions to the standard libraries. adding split to Data.List. Gwern Branwen 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 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 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 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 Haskell news from the blogosphere. Real-World Haskell: 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: ICFP 2008 Post-Mortem. Brent Yorgey: 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: Week 5 progress. An update on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project. Brent Yorgey: ICFP programming contest reflections. >>> Chris Bogart: 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: Quicksort erratum. A time and space analysis of a classic quicksort implementation in Haskell. Ralf Lammel: Research positions on Modeling and Analyzing Software Adaptation, University of Koblenz. Max Bolingbroke: Compiler Plugins For GHC: Week Five. An update on Max's Google Summer of Code project. Luke Plant: 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: Stemming with Haskell. A stemming library and Sphinx client for Haskell. >>> Duane Johnson: Haskell is Popular on IRC. The large amount of community participation and academic brainshare gives Duane a lot of confidence in Haskell. >>> Mike Harris: ICFP Programming Contest '08. Mike participated in the ICFP programming contest, and might try porting his solution to Haskell. Luke Palmer: The Curry-Howard isomorphism and the duality of x and ->. Magnus Therning: Playing with prefixes. Magnus explores different ways to encode units of storage (bytes, kilobytes, kibibytes...) in Haskell. Dan Piponi (sigfpe): MSFP 2008. Shin-Cheng Mu: Tail-Recursive, Linear-Time Fibonacci. Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 7. FP Lunch: CCC-ness of the category of containers. JP Moresmau: instance Data Map where -- half done!. JP writes an Data.Generics.Data instance for Data.Map. >>> Rick Carback: AutoKey in Haskell. Rick is learning Haskell and has implemented a simple AutoKey cipher. >>> Jeremy Frens: PE Problem #2 in All Languages (Part II). Luke Palmer: Required Optimization. Annotations for specifying expected compiler optimizations? London Haskell Users Group: AngloHaskell 2008. >>> Justus: 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 the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. Headlines are available as PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/. [Less]

Haskell Weekly News: July 09, 2008 Welcome to issue 76 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. The ICFP Programming Contest is this weekend! Go forth and kick some butt, Haskell-style. A big thank you in advance to ... [More] all those at PSU and U Chicago who are working hard to write and run the contest. Community News Luke Palmer (luqui) is having a great time in Antwerp. John Goerzen's son is so cute, it should be illegal. Announcements Haskell-cafe on lively.com. Edward Kmett has created a Haskell Cafe room on Google's new virtual-world platform Lively (which is unfortunately windows-only at the moment). Uniplate 1.2. Neil Mitchell announced the release of Uniplate 1.2, a library for reducing boilerplate code by performing generic traversals. Version 1.2 features some bug fixes, a compatibility layer with Compos and SYB, and a 25-50% performance increase over Uniplate 1.0. GHC 6.8.2 stable in Gentoo. Luis Araujo announced that GHC 6.8.2, and its accompanying libraries, have now been marked as stable in the official Gentoo portage tree. The Monad.Reader (11) - Call for Copy. Wouter Swierstra announced a call for copy for Issue 11 of the Monad.Reader. The submission deadline is August 1, although you should let Wouter know as soon as possible if you plan to submit something. hCsound. John Lato announced the initial public release of hCsound, a Haskell binding to the Csound audio processing language API. Portland and OSCon. John Goerzen inquired whether any Haskellers in Portland would be interested in getting together during OSCon July 23 or 24. Faster graph SCCs. Iavor Diatchki announced that he has implemented Tarjan's algorithm for computing the strongly connected components of a graph, which is considerably faster than the containers package for larger graphs. Iavor's implementation is available in the GraphSCC package. parallel map/reduce. jinjing exhibited some code for doing parallel map/reduce computations. Disciplined Disciple Compiler. Ben Lippmeier announced version 1.1 of the Disciplined Disciple Compiler (DDC), an explicitly lazy dialect of Haskell, with support for first class destructive update of arbitrary data, computational effects without the need for state monads, and type directed field projections. Version 1.1 includes a number of new features and more example code. darcs 2.0.2. David Roundy announced the release of darcs 2.0.1 and 2.0.2. These releases fix quite a few bugs, and users of darcs 2 are strongly recommended to upgrade. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 Google Summer of Code. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. Over the past two weeks, he has implemented type safe dynamic loading, an annotations system, and some sample plugins. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4. This week, he has been working on type searching, using a much more efficient algorithm than type search in previous versions of Hoogle. Next week, he plans to finish off type search and work on the build system. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell. He spent most of this week fixing bugs and improving existing simulation code. And he now has something to show for it! Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. This week, he created a semantic representation for declarations and types, and a way to convert between an AST representation and a semantic representation. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API. Libraries Proposals and extensions to the standard libraries. Extensible exceptions. Ian Lynagh sent out a proposal to replace the current exception mechanism in the base library with extensible exceptions, a la Simon Marlow's extensible extensions paper. Deadline for discussion is 25th July. Discussion Qualified import syntax badly designed (?). Neil Mitchell began a discussion about Haskell syntax for qualified module imports (and module imports in general). Trouble with zip12. Michael Feathers is having trouble with the zip12 function and some weird SQL-related errors... Santana on my evil ways. John D. Ramsdell set off a spate of Haskell song and poetry. Alternatives to convoluted record syntax. Dougal Stanton asked about alternatives to convoluted record update syntax, eliciting a number of interesting responses. Jobs Lectureship in Functional Programming, Nottingham. Graham Hutton announced an opening for a Lecturer in the Functional Programming Lab in Nottingham, a recently formed research group that comprises Thorsten Altenkirch, Graham Hutton, Henrik Nilsson, four research fellows, and eleven PhD students. Applications from the Haskell community are encouraged! The closing date for applications is Friday 15th August 2008. Blog noise Haskell news from the blogosphere. Edward Kmett: A Lively Haskell Cafe. A Haskell Cafe room on lively.com! Sterling Clover: Comonads in everyday life. A neat post on using a zipper comonad to render a website menu hierarchy without lots of duplicated effort. Chung-chieh Shan: Differentiating regions. Real-World Haskell: Real World Haskell, The Book, Available for Pre-Order. Benedikt Huber: An analysis-friendly representation. An update on Benedikt's Google Summer of Code project, Language.C. Chris Okasaki: Breadth-First Numbering: An Algorithm in Pictures. Algorithms without words! >>> Jeremy Frens: PE Problem #2 in All Languages (Part I). Jeremy explores solutions to Project Euler problem #2 in a variety of languages. Roman Cheplyaka: Double buffering & demo. A demo of Roman's Google Summer of Code physics simulator! Roman Cheplyaka: QuickCheck puzzle: the answer. Why Roman's QuickCheck test involving nonzero vectors didn't terminate. Sneaky. Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 6. A status report on Roman's Google Summer of Code project. >>> JP Moresmau: Handling errors in JSON to Haskell deserialization. JP adds error handling with an Either monad to his JSON deserialization code. Braden Shepherdson: Fixed Point Datatypes. Braden explains the concept of recursive data types as fixed points of functors. Luis Araujo: GHC 6.8.2 stable! (Himerge 0.21.9 too!). Matthew Sackman: Anglo Haskell 2008. Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 6. >>> James Hague: Functional Programming Went Mainstream Years Ago. Max Bolingbroke: Compiler Plugins For GHC: Weeks Three and Four. An update on Max's Google Summer of Code project. >>> David Overton: A Haskell Sudoku Solver using Finite Domain Constraints. David shows how to use his Haskell constraint solver to solve Sudoku puzzles. Pretty neat! >>> Lorenz Pretterhofer: Haskell Does Concurrency. Edward Kmett: Anamorphism. The newest installment in Edward's field guide to recursion schemes. John Goerzen (Real World Haskell): Last Call for Comments on Most Chapters. Real World Haskell is going to press soon! Get your final comments in ASAP! Edward Kmett: MSFP 2008. Lennart Augustsson: Lost and Found. A very slick Haskell library for tracing how expressions are actually evaluated, including the ability to explicitly see the sharing involved! Tom Nielsen (FP Lunch): braincurry. A domain specific language to define and execute experiments and simulations related to cellular neuroscience. Alex McLean: Visualisation of a triangular mesh. Paul R Brown: Beust Sequence Ruminations. Thoughts on solving an interesting puzzle in Haskell. >>> David Overton: Constraint Programming in Haskell. David is working on a constraint logic programming system in Haskell. >>> chaource: Why functional programming is almost dead (and has always been). Interesting argument? Flawed premises? Both? None of the above? You decide! Quotes of the Week jfredett: I'd code but I'm so drugged up I could only write effective code in perl. SamB: [SamB] @let forkbomb n = forkbomb (2*n) `par` forkbomb (2*n 1) [lambdabot] Defined. [SamB] > forkbomb 1 -!- lambdabot [[email protected]] has quit [Remote closed the connection] vinicius: haskell is macgyver with bananas, barbed wired and envelopes dons: huh, amazon recommends Neal Stephenson RWH Pseudonym: trapped in the IO monad: The lesser known R. Kelly opera byorgey: Extreme Anger Programming: you are paired with a really dumb partner and after twenty minutes of agony you rip the keyboard from their hands, delete everything they typed, and do it yourself About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. Headlines are available as PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . [Less]

Haskell Weekly News: July 02, 2008 Welcome to issue 75 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. Announcements Anglo Haskell 2008. Matthew Sackman announced AngloHaskell 2008, a gathering of all people ... [More] Haskell-related from beginners, to seasoned hackers to academic giants. All and more are welcomed by large fuzzy green lambdas. The proposed dates and location are Friday the 8th and Saturday the 9th of August, at Imperial College, London. CFP - Special Issue of Fundamenta Informaticae on Dependently Typed Programming. Wouter Swierstra announced a call for papers for a special issue of Fundamenta Informaticae on Dependently Typed Programming. The deadline for submissions is October 1. Gtk2Hs 0.9.13. Peter Gavin announced the release of Gtk2Hs 0.9.13, including bindings for Gnome VFS and GStreamer, a new Gtk tutorial adapted by Hans van Thiel, cairo image stride support, and more. Hasim. Jochem Berndsen announced Hasim, a small project to create a library to do discrete event simulation in Haskell, using monads to define a domain-specific language for "actions" of a process. Galois move. Don Stewart announced that Galois has completed the move of its data center. Expect speedier response times for hackage.haskell.org and darcs.haskell.org. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 Google Summer of Code. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4. This week, Neil worked on better Haddock database generation, lazy name searching, and a snazzy --info flag for Hoogle. Next up: type search! DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell. This week, he worked on implementing Mirtich's V-Clip algorithm for collision detection (and got it to work), cabalized his project and added documentation. He also ran into an interesting QuickCheck puzzle. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. This week, he created a generic framework for automatically running QuickCheck tests at a number of different types. This week he plans to synthesize the many suggestions from the discussion on the libraries list into a stable API design. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. This week he worked on a better representation for declarators, and abstracted the notion of an InputStream over both String and ByteString, among other accomplishments. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API. Officials at HWN headquarters have released a statement reversing their previous position regarding the existence of Thomas, citing regrettably faulty information to explain their previous misapprehensions. Expect to hear more from Thomas soon, now that he has finished graduating and moving. Libraries Proposals and extensions to the standard libraries. GetOpt formatting improvements. Duncan Coutts proposed some modifications to make the output of the System.Console.GetOpt library more readable, resulting in quite a bit of discussion. HughesPJ improvements. Benedikt Huber proposed a patch with some bug fixes, performance improvements, and QuickCheck test suite for the Text.PrettyPrint.HughesPJ pretty-printing library. Discussion A Monad for on-demand file generation?. Joachim Breitner asked about a monad for transparently tracking files which may need to be regenerated due to dependencies, leading to an interesting discussion of incremental computation, strict vs. lazy I/O, and other issues. New mailing list proposal: Haskell-Edu. Benjamin L. Russell sent out a message proposing a new mailing list hosted at haskell.org, "Haskell-Edu: The Haskell Educational Mailing List." The 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. Comments and discussion welcomed. Learning GADT types to simulate dependent types. Paul Johnson is trying to use GADTs to simulate aspects of a dependently typed system, and asks for help improving his Oleg rating. Call graph tool?. C.M.Brown asked whether there is a tool for visualizing the call graph for a collection of source files, leading to a discussion of various tools. Jobs Formal methods and automated reasoning at Rockwell Collins. Janis Voigtlaender passed on an opening for a Senior Systems Engineer at Rockwell Collins. The opening is for a computer scientist or engineer to develop and apply automated analysis to computer systems and to pursue research in formal methods and automated reasoning. Contact: rmgatto at rockwellcollins.com. Blog noise Haskell news from the blogosphere. Roman Cheplyaka: V-Clip seems to work!. Benedikt Huber: Last week on Language.C (1). An update on Benedikt's Google Summer of Code project. Jamie Brandon: Week 3 progress. An update on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project. Philip Wadler: Welcome to Scotland, Neil, Patricia, and Conor!. >>> codders: Coding style, Haskell. codders likes how Real World Haskell gives some hints about Haskell coding style and culture in addition to teaching the language itself. >>> zoo: Haskell plug-in for Eclipse. zoo explains how to install the Haskell Eclipse plugin. Dan Piponi (sigfpe): A blessed man's formula for holey containers. Dan descries an enlightening derivation of the combinatorial form of Faa di Bruno's formula from the perspective of derivatives of types. Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 5. An update on Roman's Google Summer of Code project. >>> codders: More Haskell fun. >>> Marco Tulio Gontijo e Silva: Rank 2 Types. Marco describes a practical use for GHC's rank-2 types. Edward Kmett: Memoizing Context. >>> JP Moresmau: Deserializing JSON to Haskell Data objects. >>> codders: Getting started with Haskell... still. codders is learning Haskell by reading the beta version of Real World Haskell. Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 5. Arnar: Parsing JSON with Haskell. A nice example of using Parsec to parse JSON. Thomas Hartman: HAppS Tutorial. Quotes of the Week quicksilver: [on what OS sjanssen uses] sjanssen runs haskell programs in his head; much more efficient. EvilTerran: "We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the phantom types began to take hold." audreyt: o/~ the phantom of the typesystem is here / inside my mind! o/~ dmwit: No, no, no, ($) isn't right-assoc, it's wrong-assoc. solrize: this would never happen in haskell: i sent in a search query to a certain python program, but left the query field empty, expecting to get back an error message. instead it found a bunch of books written by the diet doctor Gary Null. heatsink: We're all inside do-blocks in the IO monad if you think about it. djsiegel: [upon having a question answered by dons] oh my, I'm talking to the man mar77a: the first computers were big because they were actually cupboards with fast humans inside About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. Headlines are available as PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . [Less]

Haskell Weekly News: June 25, 2008 Welcome to issue 74 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. This week, you'll notice a bit more detail in the 'Blogs' section. I've added summaries to some of the posts, to help you ... [More] decide which you might be interested to read (only a few this week, since I added them at the last minute). I've also >>> highlighted blogs not syndicated on Planet Haskell---mostly people who have just begun learning Haskell and decided to blog about it. Go show them some comment love, and invite them into the community! Community News Andrew Wagner (chessguy) recently flew out to Microsoft for an interview with their Live Search team. In an email to the cafe, he shares some stories from his experience and some interesting coding challenges. Announcements HAppS self-demoing tutorial. Thomas Hartman announced a self-demoing, HStringTemplate-using intro to HAppS. Check out the live demo or obtain it from Hackage. NWFP Interest Group. Greg Meredith announced the next monthly meeting of the NW Functional Programmers Interest group, 6:30 on June 25 at the Seattle Public Library. Greg will talk about a very cool compositional representation of graphs he's been tinkering with recently. ICFP final call for posters. Matthew Fluet announced the final call for proposals for the ICFP 2008 poster session, which should be submitted by June 30. Let people know what you're working on! type-level and parameterized-data packages. Alfonso Acosta announced the release of the type-level and parameterized-data packages, which provide type-level computation and parameterized types a la a dependently-typed system. Lambda in the sun. James Iry announced the creation of Southern California Functional Programmers (SoCalFP), a group for people in LA, Orange County, and San Diego to meet to discuss, debate, present, and learn about functional programming concepts and techniques in various languages. Real World Haskell. Bryan O'Sullivan announced the availability of ten new draft chapters of Real World Haskell, the upcoming O'Reilly book being written by Bryan, John Goerzen, and Don Stewart. In case you were worried, yes, you'll be able to have one in your Christmas stocking! Pugs on hackage!. Audrey Tang has uploaded to Hackage version 6.2.13.2 of Pugs, an implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell. Literal programming with rst-literals. Martin Blais described a neat use of his utility rst-literals to extract Haskell code from ReST documents, enabling a different style of literate programming. Pipe 1.0. Matti Niemenmaa announced the release of Pipe, a library for piping data through a pipeline of processes. HUnit. Richard Giraud announced that he has improved the HUnit documentation and published the changes in a darcs repository. hback. Norbert Wojtowicz announced a new release of hback, a Haskell implementation of the dual n-back memory game using gtk2hs. Google Summer of Code Progress updates from participants in the 2008 Google Summer of Code. Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4, and recently added two new features, multi-word search and intelligent suggestions. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell. This week he intended to implement simple ad-hoc cubic collision geometry to test collisions with rotation, but the code became too cumbersome and non-extensible. He took a break to read some papers, and found a better solution. GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. This week he worked on adding arbitrary user-specified phases to GHC, implementing a control system, pipeline generation, and Template Haskell integration. Next he plans to work on a plugin annotation system. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal. He has posted a detailed explanation of his project, some of the issues involved, and his progress so far. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. This week he worked on AST documentation and improvements, prepared to port the AST analysis from c2hs, and worked on the pretty printer's internals. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. Recently he has worked on implementing some bitpacking tools to save memory. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is supposedly working on improvements to the GHC API. However, officials at HWN headquarters have begun privately speculating that Thomas does not, in fact, exist. Discussion history of tuples vs pairs. Conal Elliott asked about the history of support for n-tuples in Haskell and ML. hackageDB maintainer policy. Ross Paterson began a lengthy discussion towards agreeing on a policy for uploading packages to Hackage, specifying whether the package is maintained and who is maintaining it, and other related issues. What is a rigid type variable?. Xiao-Yong Jin asked what the 'rigid type variables' are that are sometimes referred to in GHC error messages. Read the thread for a concise discussion and the solution to the original problem. Map interface. Jamie Brandon started a thread asking for feedback on his proposed API for generic tries, and the discussion is still ongoing. Left and right folds. George Kangas exhibited a pair of very elegant alternate definitions for left and right fold, and showed how this alternate viewpoint makes obvious several algebraic identities as well as the generalization to Data.Foldable. A must-read for the aspiring functional programmer. ribbonsPerLine. Alfonso Acosta asked an interesting question about "ribbonsPerLine" in the Text.PrettyPrint.HughesPJ library. Do you know what it does? The answer can be found in the original paper describing the library. Jobs PhD position at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Simon Marlow announced, on behalf of Patricia Johann, an open PhD position in operational and categorical approaches to parametricity. The funded position is in the newly-formed Mathematically Structured Programming group at the University of Strathclyde, comprising Neil Ghani, Patricia Johann, and Conor McBride. Quantitative Trading Developer Position at Hutchin Hill Capital. Neil Mehra announced an open position for a Quantitative Trading Developer at Hutchin Hill Capital, a newly formed multi-strategy hedge fund located in midtown Manhattan. Blog noise Haskell news from the blogosphere. >>> Blockcipher: Converting Geospatial Coordinates. Blockcipher has had enough of reading Haskell tutorials, and is itching to actually create something useful! Roman Cheplyaka: V-Clip algorithm (status update). An update on Roman's Google Summer of Code project. Andy Gill: Memo class using type families. >>> blueapple: Project Euler. blueapple is hooked on Project Euler and has been using it as an opportunity to learn Haskell. >>> Dinesh Pillay: Haskell & Type Inference. Dinesh has been learning Haskell for just a few days now and is really enjoying it. In this post he shares a problem he was having with types and its solution. Don Stewart (dons): Daily Haskell: Download and analyse logs, then generate sparklines. A new series on gluing Hackage libraries together to get things done. Max Bolingbroke: Compiler Plugins For GHC: Week Two. An update on Max's Google Summer of Code project. Edward Kmett: Paramorphism. Edward Kmett: Catamorphism. Edward Kmett: Recursion Schemes: A Field Guide. Edward is writing up a 'field guide' to all those 'foomorphism' recursion schemes. Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 4. Real World Haskell: Ten new draft chapters. Jamie Brandon: Bitpacking. Updates on Jamie's Google Summer of Code project. Jamie Brandon: Finally!. Brent Yorgey: ZipEdit. Brent describes a new library for creating simple interactive list editors. Real-World Haskell: Video of my concurrent/multicore Haskell talk is up. Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 4. An update on Roman's Google Summer of Code project. Osfameron: More Countdown: laziness, Scheme, and German frogs. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan): a dependency analysis framework for Cabal. Osfameron: Schwartzian transform in Haskell. Neil Mitchell: Hoogle 4 New Features. Thomas M. DuBuisson: Past and Future libraries. >>> codeflow: Haskell a grain of Python. codeflow talks about his experience learning Haskell and functional programming. >>> Peter Christensen: Hey Language Snobs: Don't Pinch Pennies. >>> Micah Elliott: 1983-96: The Golden Age of Programming Languages. Quotes of the Week povman: when does ghc6.10 plan to release itself? Baughn: So I just rewrote a fairly complex text extraction/indexing system to pipeline its work across several processors - painlessly, in less than five minutes. Bravo, haskell! monochrom: We need to cabalise Cale. Botje: h0t (monoid `mappend` monoid) action? quicksilver: the only tool we have in haskell98 for performing an action is the magic sigil 'main =' solrize: haskell has a very steep unlearning curve :) Botje: drug users pass around needles, haskell users pass around Oleg papers qwe1234: i know haskell, ocaml, scheme and prolog better than you ever will. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. Headlines are available as PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . [Less]

Haskell Weekly News: June 18, 2008 Welcome to issue 73 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. The Google Summer of Code is in full swing, preparations are underway for ICFP and the eleventh ICFP Programming Contest ... [More] , and cabal-install is oh-so-sexy. It's an exciting time to be a part of the Haskell community! Community News Andy Gill has completed his move from Portland, OR to Kansas. Luke Palmer (luqui) has begun work for Anygma, Peter Verswyvelen's startup using Haskell (among other languages) to ``generate easy-to-use tools for creating audio-visual 2D/3D content.'' Congrats to Andy and Luke on their new beginnings! Announcements Final CFP: 2008 Haskell Symposium. Andy Gill announced the final call for papers for the 2008 Haskell Symposium. The deadline is the 23rd of this month; please submit a paper! cabal-install. Duncan Coutts announced the release of cabal-install-0.5, along with the release of Cabal-1.4 to support it. It features an improved command line interface, smarter upgrading, and is made of win. If you are still stuck in the dark ages of runhaskell Setup configure blah blah, then the imperative monkeys have already won. ICFP programming contest. Tim Chevalier announced the eleventh annual ICFP programming contest, to be held from Friday, July 11, 2008 to Monday, July 14, 2008. Are you ready? c.h.o trac. Ian Lynagh announced that it is now possible for projects on community.haskell.org to create themselves a trac, providing a bug tracking system and wiki. random-access-list. Stephan Friedrichs announced an implementation of Chris Okasaki's random-access lists, providing typical list operations (cons, head, tail) in O(1) and indexed random-access in O(log n). GHC version 6.8.3. Ian Lynagh announced a new patchlevel release of GHC, containing a number of bugfixes relative to 6.8.2. Printf-TH. Marc Weber announced that he has taken over maintenance of the Printf-TH library, which implements a printf function via Template Haskell, in order to guarantee that wrong argument types or the wrong number of arguments will result in compile time errors. Mueval. Gwern Branwen announced the release of the mueval package, providing a standalone executable for evaluating Haskell expressions based on the GHC API. Topkata. Christoph Bauer announced the release of Topkata, a simple OpenGL game written in Haskell. The goal is to guide a ball through a labyrinth to the opposite corner. Haddock Trac. David Waern announced a new bug-tracker and wiki for the Haddock project. Fortress talk. Jeff Polakow announced that a talk on Fortress, a new OO/functional language from Sun, will take place on Wednesday, June 25 at 6:30pm in Manhattan, New York, USA. ieee-0.2. Patrick Perry announced the release of ieee, a library that provides approximate comparison of floating point numbers based, NaN-aware minimum and maximum, and a type class for approximate comparisons. Google Summer of Code Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm) is working on Hoogle 4, recently adding support for generating Hoogle databases to Haddock, using the GHC API. This week he plans to work on database creation and text searches. DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach) is working on a physics engine using Data Parallel Haskell, recently adding rotations, represented by quaternions. Next he plans to handle collisions properly with respect to rotation, and to add documentation. Generic tries. Jamie Brandon is writing a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. He has come up with a preliminary API and is asking for feedback. Cabal dependency framework. Andrea Vezzosi (Saizan) is working on a make-like dependency analysis framework for Cabal, recently refining the core model, that has built its first sources in the testing environment. The next step will be dealing with preprocessor chaining. Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq) is working on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer library for C99. The test suite is finished, the parser and pretty printer support most GNU extensions, and all failing tests of gcc.dg are documented. GHC API. Thomas Schilling (nominolo) is working on improvements to the GHC API. GHC plugins. Maximilian Conroy Bolingbroke is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. Discussion Low-level array performance. Dan Doel began a discussion about the fannkuch benchmark and the current state of Haskell support for fast low-level array operations. 1/0. Evan Laforge began a lively discussion about Infinity, NaN, and Haskell's support for the IEEE floating-point standard. Documenting the impossible. Andrew Coppin began a discussion on the relative merits of {-# IMPOSSIBLE #-} pragmas, calls to 'error' and 'assert', the use of tools like Catch, and other methods of annotating impossible cases. Blog noise Haskell news from the blogosphere. PE Problem #1 in Haskell osfameron: Countdown words game solver in Haskell Algebraic Data Types in JavaScript Finance and Haskell Well-Typed.Com: New Cabal and cabal-install releases Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 3 Max Bolingbroke: Compiler Plugins For GHC: The First Week Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Categories of polynomials and comonadic plumbing Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 3 Thomas DuBuisson (TomMD): Static Buffers Considered Harmful Quotes of the Week ddarius: Here's the short guide to Haskell for OO programmers: Haskell isn't at all an OO language. swalters: I'm starting to believe that learning haskell is mostly about carefully crafting small and clever functions and then finding out that they are already part of the standard library. About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. Headlines are available as PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at seas dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . [Less]

Haskell Weekly News: June 11, 2008 Welcome to issue 72 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. Greetings, Haskellites! As many of you have already heard, Don Stewart has passed on the editorship of the HWN to me ... [More] (Brent Yorgey). I'd like to thank Don and John Goerzen for their great work putting it together in the past, and I'm excited to make the HWN once again into a reliable, useful compendium of happenings in the Haskell community. You can expect to see a few changes---for example, hackage uploads will no longer be listed in the HWN (unless they are announced on the haskell or haskell-cafe mailing lists), since you can now see a dynamically updated list on the front page of the Haskell wiki. This edition includes all the announcements going back to Issue 71, but only some of the blog posts, since I couldn't find a way to get old feed data from Planet Haskell. Hopefully next week things will settle down to something more normal(ish) and I can begin tinkering with the format. Feel free to send suggestions and/or stories for inclusion to me, byorgey at gmail dot com. Enjoy---'Putting the W back in HWN!' Announcements hfann. Olivier Boudry announced the first release of the hfann module, an interface to the 'Fast Artificial Neural Network (FANN)' library. funsat. Denis Bueno announced a release of funsat, a modern, DPLL-style SAT solver written in Haskell. Funsat solves formulas in conjunctive normal form and produces a total variable assignment for satisfiable problems. DEFUN08: Call for talks and tutorials. Matthew Fluet announced the final call for talks and tutorials at DEFUN 2008, to be held in conjunction with ICFP. Cabal-1.4 Release Candidate. Duncan Coutts announced the second release candidate for Cabal-1.4. Programmer's Minesweeper. Bertram Felgenhauer announced a Haskell implementation of Programmer's Minesweeper, which allows programmers to implement minesweeper strategies and run them. hackage RSS feed. Don Stewart announced a new RSS feed for the most recently uploaded packages on Hackage. BLAS bindings. Patrick Perry announced a set of bindings for the BLAS linear algebra library. Xen Control bindings. Thomas DuBuisson announced the hsXenCtrl package, with FFI bindings to Xen. bloomfilter. Bryan O'Sullivan announced the availability of a fast Bloom filter library for Haskell. A Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure that provides a fast set membership querying capability. It does not give false negatives, but has a tunable false positive rate. HCAR. Janis Voigtlaender announced the 14th edition of the Haskell Community and Activities Report (HCAR). HSmugMug. Daniel Patterson announced HSmugMug, a Haskell wrapper to the photo hosting site SmugMug's API. LIPL. Sam Lee announced the release of LIPL, a tiny functional language implemented as a term project to learn Haskell. Glome 0.51. Jim Snow announced version 0.51 of glome, a raytracer written in Haskell. ChessLibrary. Andrew Wagner announced the ChessLibrary project, and mentioned that he is looking for an experienced haskeller to serve as a mentor for this project. xmonad-utils. Gwern Branwen announced the upload to hackage of xmonad-utils, a couple of small Xlib programs which might be useful for xmonad users. Roguestar. Christopher Lane Hinson announced the release of Roguestar 0.2, a science fiction themed roguelike (turn-based, chessboard-tiled, role playing) game written in Haskell. Streaming Component Combinators. Mario Blazevic announced the 0.1 release of Streaming Component Combinators in Haskell, based on earlier work done in OmniMark. Twitter client. Chris Eidhof announced a simple terminal-based Twitter client. Monad.Reader call for copy. Wouter Swierstra issued a call for copy for The Monad.Reader. The submission deadline for Issue 11 is August 1. category-extras. Edward Kmett announced a new release of the category-extras package, involving all sorts of new categorical goodness. Session Types for Haskell. Matthew Sackman announced the availability of Session Types for Haskell. Session types are a means of describing communication between multiple threads, and statically verifying that the communication being performed is safe and conforms to the specification. Haddock 2.1.0. David Waern announced the release of Haddock 2.1.0. ReviewBoard. Adam Smyczek announced the release of Haskell bindings to ReviewBoard, a development tool designed to monitor code changes and analyze dependencies. diagrams. Brent Yorgey announced the initial release of Graphics.Rendering.Diagrams, an embedded domain-specific language for creating simple pictures and diagrams, built on top of the Cairo vector graphics library. HXT. Uwe Schmidt announced a new release of the Haskell XML Toolbox. GSoC. Malcolm Wallace announced the seven student projects chosen to be funded by the Google Summer of Code. bytestring. Don Stewart announced a new major release of bytestring, the efficient string library for Haskell, suitable for high-performance scenarios. HXQ. Leonidas Fegaras announced the release of HXQ, an XQuery compiler/interpreter for Haskell. Win32-notify. Niklas Broberg announced the first release of Win32-notify, an inotify-alike for Windows. cpuid. Martin Grabmueller announced the new cpuid package, which provides functionality for accessing information about the currently running IA-32 processor. Emping. Hans van Thiel announced version 0.5 of the Emping package, a utility which derives the shortest rules from a table of rules. datapacker. John Goerzen announced the first release of datapacker, a tool to pack files into a minimum number of CDs, DVDs, or any other arbitrary bin. darcswatch. Joachim Breitner announced the release of darcswatch, a tool for tracking darcs patches and repositories. Generic Haskell. Thomas van Noort announced the fifth release of Generic Haskell, an extension of Haskell that facilitates generic programming. drawingcombinators. Luke Palmer announced the release of graphics-drawingcombinators, a wrapper around OpenGL with a functional interface. The Monad.Reader. Wouter Swierstra announced the publication of Issue 10 of The Monad.Reader, a quarterly magazine about functional programming. Well-Typed LLP. Ian Lynagh announced that he, Björn Bringert and Duncan Coutts have set up a Haskell consultancy company, Well-Typed LLP. Their services include application development, library and tool maintenance, project advice, and training. hgdbmi. Evan Martin announced the hgdbmi package, which wraps the operations of attaching GDB to a process and parsing the GDB/MI output. xmonad. Don Stewart announced the release of xmonad version 0.7. Updates include improved integration with GNOME, more flexible "rules", various stability fixes, and of course, many new and interesting features in the extension library. Haskell Server Pages. Niklas Broberg announced a new release of Haskell Server Pages, a programming model for writing dynamic web pages in Haskell, both server-side and client-side. Network.MiniHTTP. Adam Langley announced a release of network-minihttp, a small bytestring HTTP library. Disciplined Disciple Compiler. Ben Lippmeier announced the initial alpha release of the Disciplined Disciple Compiler, an explicitly lazy dialect of Haskell. haskell-src-exts. Niklas Broberg announced a new release for haskell-src-exts, a package for handling and manipulating Haskell source code. omnicodec. Magnus Therning announced the package omnicodec, containing two command line utilities for encoding and decoding data. Blog noise Haskell news from the blogosphere. Christophe Poucet (vincenz): ICFP Contest 2008 Real-World Haskell: CUFP 2007 videos now easier to view Wrap-up: mergesort in haskell jbofihe and Haskell Writing a Regular Expression parser in Haskell: Part 3 Real World Haskell London Haskell Users Group: Next meeting: Paradise, a DSEL for derivatives pricing Christophe Poucet (vincenz): Lazy memoization Neil Mitchell: GSoC Hoogle: Week 2 Magnus Therning: Google Treasure Hunt primes question Roman Cheplyaka: Status report: week 2 Andy Gill: The unknown cost of dictionaries Edward Kmett: Zapping Adjunctions Edward Kmett: Representing Adjunctions Andy Gill: Performance problems with functional representation of derivatives Conal Elliott: Functional linear maps Quotes of the Week roconnor: if you click your heels and say ``there is no binding like gtk2hs'' then dcoutts will appear and answer your question. mauke: the first rule of fix club is "the first rule of fix club is "the first rule of fix club is... oerjan: so does this mean that a comonad is like a wildlife preserve on an island in a sea of nuclear waste? quicksilver: head-explosion is the solution, not the problem. Botje: [on googling for polyvariadic typeclasses] OH GOD THE FIRST HIT IS OLEGS SITE! / *ahum* / I meant, "yay, reading material" Baughn: From my point of view, anyone who understands everything ghc can do is /scary/. I'm sure that will change once I reach that level myself, but then again, there's also the possibility that I'll be in a permanent state of autophobia. newsham: I think the problem with people asking homework questions in this channel is that the people in this channel don't have enough homework questions of their own to do. quicksilver: *** quicksilver beats Deewiant with the i-will-not-use-fail-stick [Deewiant] quicksilver: I'm willing to accept a good alternative. [quicksilver] no. all you are permitted to accept is a beating. mar77a: MONAD ARGHH GHGRHGH HGHRGHR RUN Cale: Types are a bit like the nubs on lego bricks which provide structural integrity while suggesting how the bricks should fit together. quicksilver: zip`ap`tail the aztec god of consecutive numbers About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org. Headlines are available as PDF. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the contributing information. Send stories to byorgey at gmail dot com. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ [Less]