[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 111 - March 28, 2009

Brent Yorgey byorgey at seas.upenn.edu
Sat Mar 28 11:43:59 EDT 2009 

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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090328
Issue 111 - March 28, 2009
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   Welcome to issue 111 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

Announcements

   CHP package. Neil Brown [2]announced the release of version 1.2.0 of
   the [3]CHP library (which supports explicit message-passing concurrency
   in Haskell), with various bug-fixes and a new "clock" synchronisation
   primitive.

   smartword 0.0.0.5 Web based flash card for Word Smart I and II
   vocabularies. Ki Yung Ahn [4]announced the release of [5]smartword
   0.0.0.5, a web based flash card system for Word Smart I and II, a
   popular book series for studying GRE vocabularies.

   HackMail 0.0 -- Procmail + Monads = Awesome!. Joe Fredette [6]announced
   his very second Hackage upload, [7]HackMail. Hackmail is a
   Procmail-alike, though it doesn't (yet) support procmail syntax. It
   dynamically loads a haskell source file and then sits as a daemon
   watching a directory for new emails. The source file contains a
   function which sorts email and delivers it to some directory.

   FallingBlocks 0.1. Ben Sanders [8]announced [9]fallingblocks, a Tetris
   clone using SDL.

   io-capture-0.2 capturing std(out|err) in IO action. Yusaku Hashimoto
   [10]announced the release of [11]io-capture 0.2, a library to capture
   stdout and stderr in an IO action. It exports a function capture, which
   takes an IO action and a String representing the entire input, and
   returns Strings representing the data written to stdout and stderr.

   wxAsteroids 1.0. Henk-Jan van Tuyl [12]announced [13]wxAsteroids, a
   game demonstrating the wxHaskell GUI.

   The votes are in!. Eelco Lempsink [14]announced that the [15]results of
   the Haskell logo competition are in! Congratulations to Jeff Wheeler on
   his winning design.

   Making videos of your project. Don Stewart [16]described how to create
   short screencasts showing off your latest awesome Haskell project.

   WinGhci, a GUI for GHCI on Windows. Pepe Gallardo [17]announced the
   first release of [18]WinGhci, a simple GUI for GHCI on Windows. It is
   closely based on WinHugs, and provides similar functionality.

   hranker: Basic utility for ranking a list of items (e.g. for the logo
   poll). Robin Green [19]announced [20]hranker, a command-line utility
   that helps the user rank a list of items (of any type implementing
   Show, Eq and Ord). The hope is that the code is sufficiently clear that
   it could also serve as an educational piece of code, especially for
   people wanting to learn how to use the HCL library.

   salvia-0.1, salvia-extras-0.1. Sebastiaan Visser [21]announced a new
   version of [22]Salvia, a lightweight Haskell Web Server Framework.
   Changes in this release include easier dependencies, some new default
   handler environments that simplify setting up a server application,
   support for keep-alive, a great deal of additional documentation,
   support for Windows, and various cleanup and bug fixes.

   Haddock 2.4.2. David Waern [23]announced a new release of [24]Haddock,
   the Haskell documentation tool. This is a bug fix release only, and
   it's the same version that will ship with GHC 6.10.2, unless any
   important problems are discovered before the GHC release. Because the
   .haddock file format has changed, links to previously installed
   documentation will not work when generating documentation using this
   version.

   ansi-terminal, ansi-wl-pprint - ANSI terminal support for Haskell. Max
   Bolingbroke [25]announced the [26]ansi-terminal and [27]ansi-wl-pprint
   packages, which allow Haskell programs to produce much richer console
   output by allowing colorisation, emboldening and so on. Both Unix-like
   (OS X, Linux) and Windows operating systems are supported (via a pure
   Haskell ANSI emulation layer for Windows).

   I/O library for Windows. Felix Martini [28]announced the [29]package,
   an I/O library for Windows using Windows API functions with I/O
   completion port support. The main goal of this library is to support
   Simon Marlow's new Handle API once he has added that to GHC. The
   library also has a compatibility module for socket functions from the
   network-bytestring package.

Discussion

   Grouping - Map / Reduce. Günther Schmidt [30]asked about a way to
   lazily group an unordered list of key/value pairs, leading to some
   interesting solutions and discussion of preserving laziness.

   about Haskell code written to be "too smart". Manlio Perillo began an
   [31]epic discussion about Haskell coding style, idioms, pedagogy, and
   much, much more.

Blog noise

   [32]Haskell news from the [33]blogosphere.
     * >>> : [34]I18n and Haskell. Internationalization of Haskell
       programs.
     * Holumbus: [35]Holumbus-Distribution Update.
     * Roman Cheplyaka: [36]Recent activity. Ongoing Hpysics development.
     * Jason Dagit: [37]Type-Correct Changes---A Safe Approach to Version
       Control Implementation. Jason is now a Master of Computer Science.
     * Sebastian Fischer: [38]Fair conjunction and disjunction.
     * Luke Palmer: [39]Certificate Design Pattern.
     * >>> Daniel Burrows: [40]Sometimes, tools are useful..
     * GHC / OpenSPARC Project: [41]Pinning threads to cores.
     * Galois, Inc: [42]One Million Haskell Downloads....
     * Thomas M. DuBuisson: [43]Yet another proposal for Haskell - the
       ever growing language.
     * Christopher Lane Hinson: [44]Twilight Hero.
     * Xmonad: [45]xmonad download statistics.
     * LHC Team: [46]Ease of implementation..
     * Darcs: [47]darcs weekly news #22.
     * Well-Typed.Com: [48]Regression testing with Hackage.
     * Neil Mitchell: [49]Concise Generic Queries.
     * >>> Vo Minh Thu: [50]First stab at Template Haskell.
     * >>> Nax: [51]HStringTemplate.

Quotes of the Week

     * ddarius: fmap: Because getting functions to the values is half the
       battle.
     * monochrom: Monad is about postmodernism. There are laws but no one
       owns them. You can interpret them any way you want. You can write
       about your own understanding and the meaning of your writing is not
       fixed.
     * conal: Recursion is the goto of functional programming
     * monochrom: "Monad is about computation." "Our company is about
       synergy." "iPod is about coolness." Godawful postmodernism
       nothingness.
     * olsner: nah, SkyNet is just a zygohistomorphic prepromorphism,
       nothing fancy
     * vixey: put some restriction like every token has a neighbourhood
       locally homeomophic to algol
     * gwern: Unfortunately Neo, no one can be *told* what the Monad is.

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [52]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [53]the Haskell Sequence and [54]Planet Haskell. [55]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [56]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [57]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [58]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/crg-group/2009/03/chp-120-now-with-clocks/
   3. http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/chp/
   4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55899
   5. http://kyagrd.dyndns.org/~kyagrd/project/smartword/
   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55851
   7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/HackMail
   8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55812
   9. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/fallingblocks
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55786
  11. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/io%2Dcapture
  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55783
  13. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/wxAsteroids
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55500
  15. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?num_winners=1&id=E_d21b0256a4fd5ed7&algorithm=beatpath
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55495
  17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55446
  18. http://code.google.com/p/winghci/
  19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55434
  20. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hranker
  21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55424
  22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/salvia
  23. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55345
  24. http://www.haskell.org/haddock/
  25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55324
  26. http://batterseapower.github.com/ansi-terminal/
  27. http://batterseapower.github.com/ansi-wl-pprint/
  28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55322
  29. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/winio
  30. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55579
  31. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/55539
  32. http://planet.haskell.org/
  33. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  34. http://progandprog.blogspot.com/2009/03/i18n-and-haskell.html
  35. http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/blog/?p=21
  36. http://physics-dph.blogspot.com/2009/03/recent-activity.html
  37. http://blog.codersbase.com/2009/03/25/type-correct-changes-a-safe-approach-to-version-control-implementation/
  38. http://www-ps.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~sebf/projects/fair-predicates.html
  39. http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/certificate-design-pattern/
  40. http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/sometimes-tools-are-useful/
  41. http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2009/03/pinning-threads-to-cores.html
  42. http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/03/23/one-million-haskell-downloads/
  43. http://tommd.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/yet-another-proposal-for-haskell-the-ever-growing-language/
  44. http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2009/03/22/twilight-hero/
  45. http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/xmonad-download-statistics/
  46. http://lhc-compiler.blogspot.com/2009/03/ease-of-implementation.html
  47. http://blog.darcs.net/2009/03/darcs-weekly-news-22.html
  48. http://blog.well-typed.com/2009/03/regression-testing-with-hackage/
  49. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2009/03/concise-generic-queries.html
  50. http://thu.selfip.org/entry/first-stab-th.html
  51. http://nax.is-a-geek.net/blog/entries/10/hstringtemplate
  52. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  53. http://sequence.complete.org/
  54. http://planet.haskell.org/
  55. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  56. http://haskell.org/
  57. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  58. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/

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