[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 83 - August 30, 2008

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Sat Aug 30 15:07:22 EDT 2008


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20080830
Issue 83 - August 30, 2008
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   Welcome to issue 83 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   This is the "better late than never" edition. As an excuse I could tell
   you that my home internet service has been horrible (now fixed) and I
   was away from home for a few days with my wife celebrating our third
   wedding anniversary. But instead, I give you a link to the
   [2]Uncyclopedia entry on Haskell. If you haven't already seen it, you
   should give it a read, being sure not to drink any milk at the same
   time, or at least pointing your nose away from the keyboard if you
   insist on drinking milk.

Community News

   If Dell sends John Goerzen (CosmicRay) one more catalog, it will
   [3]actually be a federal crime.

Announcements

   LogFloat 0.9. wren ng thornton [4]announced a new official release of
   the [5]logfloat package for manipulating log-domain floating numbers.
   This release is mainly for those who are playing with Transfinite
   rather than LogFloat, but the interface changes warrant a minor version
   change.

   validating xml lib - need some guidance. Marc Weber [6]asked for help
   developing an xml generating library validating the result against a
   given DTD.

   gsl-random 0.1 and monte-carlo-0.1. Patrick Perry [7]announced that he
   has started on [8]bindings for the random number generators and random
   distributions provided by the gsl. He has also written a [9]monad and
   transformer for doing monte carlo computations that uses gsl-random
   internally. For a quick tutorial in the latter package, see [10]his
   blog.

   Wired 0.1.1. Emil Axelsson [11]announced the first release of the
   hardware description library [12]Wired. Wired can be seen as an
   extension to Lava that targets (not exclusively) semi-custom VLSI
   design. A particular aim of Wired is to give the designer more control
   over the routing wires' effects on performance.

   darcs weekly news #1. Eric Kow [13]sent out the first edition of the
   new Darcs Weekly News!

   zip-archive 0.0. John MacFarlane [14]announced the release of the
   [15]zip-archive library for dealing with zip archives.

   The Monad.Reader - Issue 11. Wouter Swierstra [16]announced a new issue
   of [17]The Monad.Reader, with articles by David Place, Kenn Knowles,
   and Doug Auclair.

   First Monad Tutorial of the Season. Hans van Thiel [18]announced a new
   monad tutorial, [19]The Greenhorn's Guide to becoming a Monad Cowboy.

   "Real World Haskell" hits a milestone. Bryan O'Sullivan [20]proudly
   announced that the draft manuscript of Real World Haskell is
   [21]complete! It is now available online in its entirety. The authors
   expect the final book to be published around the beginning of November,
   and to weigh in at about 700 pages.

   Mueval 0.5.1, 0.6, 0.6.1, 0.6.2, 0.6.3, 0.6.4. Gwern Branwen
   [22]announced a number of new releases of [23]Mueval. Lambdabot now
   uses mueval for all its dynamic Haskell evaluation needs.

   Hoogle Database Generation. Neil Mitchell (ndm) [24]announced that a
   new release of the [25]Hoogle command line is out, including bug fixes
   and additional features. Upgrading is recommended.Two interesting
   features of Hoogle 4 are working with multiple function databases (from
   multiple packages), and running your own web server.

Blog noise

   [26]Haskell news from the [27]blogosphere.
     * Real-World Haskell: [28]Source handed over to production.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [29]Earning \bot-Trophies.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [30]Scanner-parsers II: State Monad
       Transformers.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [31]Scanner-parsers I: lifting
       functions.
     * >>> software engineering radio: [32]Episode 108: Simon Peyton Jones
       on Functional Programming and Haskell. A podcast interview with
       Simon Peyton Jones.
     * Neil Mitchell: [33]Running your own Hoogle on a Web Server.
     * Braden Shepherdson: [34]Announcing xmonad-light. Braden is rolling
       out a new configuration framework for xmonad, providing an easier
       learning curve for those not wanting to learn Haskell right away,
       and an easy transition to a more powerful Haskell configuration
       when they want it.
     * Gabor Grief: [35]Category. Gabor is excited that base-3.0 will
       include Control.Category.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [36]Ten = 1+2+3+4. Solving an
       arithmetic puzzle with Haskell, Prolog-style.
     * Paul R Brown: [37]perpubplat now on github.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [38]"Lucky you!"?. Doug shares some
       secrets of his success in getting Haskell/Dylan/Mercury/Prolog
       jobs.
     * Neil Mitchell: [39]Hoogle Database Generation. Neil releases a new
       command-line version of Hoogle, including bug fixes and additional
       features -- multiple function databases and the ability to run your
       own Hoogle server.
     * Patrick Perry: [40]A Monte Carlo Monad for Haskell.
     * Mads Lindstroem: [41]Proposal: Adding composability to WxHaskell.
     * Tom Moertel: [42]PXSL Tools now on Hackage and GitHub.
     * Gabor Greif: [43]Uploaded. Gabor uploads his first contribution to
       Hackage, [44]thrist-0.1.
     * Muad`Dib (vixey): [45]Tail Call Optimization doesn't exist in
       Haskell.
     * >>> Hans van Thiel: [46]The Greenhorn's Guide to becoming a Monad
       Cowboy. YAMT
     * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [47]Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part
       2. Dan continues his excellent series on rational tangles, this
       time showing the connection between tangles and rational numbers.
     * >>> Praki Prakash: [48]Learning Haskell Redux.
     * Gabor Greif: [49]Ca(ni)balized. Gabor creates his first cabal
       package!
     * Real-World Haskell: [50]Our writing is now complete!.
     * Tom Moertel: [51]Thinking algebraically: a functional-programming
       dividend that pays during your imperative-programming day job.
     * Jason Dagit: [52]Darcs 2 Real-World Push Performance Evaluation.
     * Well-Typed.Com: [53]What's wrong with make?. A lot, apparently:
       it's too static, and makes it easy to write incorrect rules. Duncan
       (dcoutts) provides an analysis.
     * Dougal Stanton: [54]Lord of the Flies as a window onto monadic IO.
     * Real-World Haskell: [55]A tighter page count estimate. Real World
       Haskell is going to be about 700 pages!?
     * Real-World Haskell: [56]Real World Haskell tutorial next month at
       DEFUN 2008.

Quotes of the Week

     * shepheb: #haskell isn't so much on-topic when discussing Haskell,
       but off-off-topic.
     * chrisdone: it's neat how you learn haskell because you are drawn in
       by the purely functional paradigm, and then you find loads more
       things like algebraic data types, monad abstractions, arrows and
       applicative, lack of objects... so that when people say "well, it's
       not haskell, but at least X is functional", it's just not the same
       at all
     * lambdabot: [tristes_tigres] @vixen unsafe [lambdabot] you're
       turning me on :)
     * b\6: sometimes i make variables f and ck and find some reason to
       multiply them like f*ck if i'm having a bad day.
     * waynemokane: wow... thanks everyone - it looks like I have a full
       day of reading type signatures ahead of me.
     * mauke: call/cthulhu
     * seydar: monads are just like saran wrap.
     * b\6: keep this info private, but you can actually overclock your
       brain. the technique i use is to loop mplayer playing oggs but
       increase the speed like -speed 1.25 for 125% normal. your brain's
       speed increases accordingly, allowing you to solve problems much
       more easily.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [57]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [58]the Haskell Sequence and [59]Planet Haskell. [60]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [61]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [62]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [63]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Haskell
   3. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/741-From-Dell,-a-Uniquely-Terrible-Experience.html
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43829
   5. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/logfloat
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43825
   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43764
   8. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/gsl-random
   9. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/monte-carlo
  10. http://quantile95.com/2008/08/27/a-monte-carlo-monad-for-haskell/
  11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43658
  12. http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~emax/wired/index.html
  13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43626
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43539
  15. http://johnmacfarlane.net/zip-archive/
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43491
  17. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_Monad.Reader
  18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43403
  19. http://www.muitovar.com/monad/moncow.xhtml
  20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43401
  21. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/08/22/our-writing-is-now-complete/
  22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/43372
  23. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/mueval
  24. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/08/hoogle-database-generation.html
  25. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hoogle
  26. http://planet.haskell.org/
  27. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  28. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/08/30/source-handed-over-to-production/
  29. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/08/earning.html
  30. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/08/scanner-parsers-ii-state-monad.html
  31. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/08/scanner-parsers-i-lifting-functions.html
  32. http://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2008-08/episode-108-simon-peyton-jones-functional-programming-and-haskell
  33. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/08/running-your-own-hoogle-on-web-server.html
  34. http://braincrater.wordpress.com/2008/08/28/announcing-xmonad-light/
  35. http://heisenbug.blogspot.com/2008/08/category.html
  36. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/08/ten-1234.html
  37. http://mult.ifario.us/p/perpubplat-now-on-github
  38. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/08/lucky-you.html
  39. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/08/hoogle-database-generation.html
  40. http://quantile95.com/2008/08/27/a-monte-carlo-monad-for-haskell/
  41. http://lindstroem.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/proposal-adding-composability-to-wxhaskell/
  42. http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2008/08/24/pxsl-tools-now-on-hackage-and-github
  43. http://heisenbug.blogspot.com/2008/08/uploaded.html
  44. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/thrist
  45. http://muaddibspace.blogspot.com/2008/08/tail-call-optimization-doesnt-exist-in.html
  46. http://www.muitovar.com/monad/moncow.xhtml
  47. http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/08/untangling-with-continued-fractions_23.html
  48. http://monadict.blogspot.com/2008/08/learning-haskell-redux-when-you-are.html
  49. http://heisenbug.blogspot.com/2008/08/canibalized.html
  50. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/08/22/our-writing-is-now-complete/
  51. http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2008/08/20/thinking-algebraically-a-functional-programming-dividend-that-pays-during-your-imperative-programming-day-job
  52. http://blog.codersbase.com/2008/08/21/darcs-2-real-world-push-performance-evaluation/
  53. http://blog.well-typed.com/2008/08/whats-wrong-with-make/
  54. http://www.dougalstanton.net/blog/index.php/2008/08/21/lord-of-the-flies-as-a-window-onto-monadic-io/
  55. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/08/20/a-tighter-page-count-estimate/
  56. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/08/20/real-world-haskell-tutorial-next-month-at-defun-2008/
  57. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  58. http://sequence.complete.org/
  59. http://planet.haskell.org/
  60. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  61. http://haskell.org/
  62. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  63. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/


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