---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20081001
Issue 87 - October 01, 2008
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Welcome to issue 87 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the
   [1]Haskell community.

   ICFP was held last week in Victoria, and by all accounts was a great
   success! This edition of the HWN includes much ICFP and Haskell
   Symposium-related content, including [2]videos of the Haskell symposium
   presentations, [3]programming contest results, some [4]notes on the
   future of Haskell, and slides from [5]a Haskell tutorial and [6]a talk
   about the Haskell Platform. But ICFP didn't seem to slow down the
   community all that much: you'll find the usual mix of newly released
   and updated packages, blog posts, mailing list discussions, and silly
   quotes as well.

Announcements

   Haskell-Embedded System Design: ForSyDe 3.0 and Tutorial. Alfonso
   Acosta [7]announced the [8]3.0 release of [9]ForSyDe. The ForSyDe
   (Formal System Design) methodology has been developed with the
   objective to move system design (e.g. System on Chip, Hardware and
   Software systems) to a higher level of abstraction. ForSyDe is
   implemented as a Haskell-embedded behavioral DSL (Domain Specific
   Language). The 3.0 release includes a new deep-embedded DSL and
   embedded compiler, as well as a new user-friendly tutorial.

   Graphalyze-0.1. Ivan Miljenovic [10]announced the initial release of
   his graph-theoretic analysis library, [11]Graphalyze. This is a
   pre-release of the library he is writing for his mathematics honours
   thesis, "Graph-Theoretic Analysis of the Relationships in Discrete
   Data".

   Symposium videos. Malcolm Wallace [12]announced [13]guerrilla videos of
   the Haskell Symposium 2008 presentations.

   ICFP programming contest results. Malcolm Wallace [14]sent a link to
   [15]a video of the ICFP programming contest results presentation.

   Version 0.4.3 of happs-tutorial is a HAppS job board, done in HAppS..
   Thomas Hartman [16]announced version 4 of the [17]self-demoing HAppS
   tutorial, a HAppS job board.

   TH code for deriving Binary and NFData instances. Tim Newsham
   [18]announced some [19]Template Haskell code for automatically deriving
   Data.Binary and Control.Parallel.Strategies.NFData instances.

   Notes on the future of Haskell from ICFP. Bryan O'Sullivan [20]posted a
   [21]writeup from the ICFP conference floor on the future of Haskell and
   functional programming.

   datapacker 1.0.1. John Goerzen [22]announced the [23]release of
   datapacker 1.0.1.

   A Functional Implementation of the Garsia-Wachs Algorithm. Nicolas
   Pouillard [24]announced a [25]Haskell implementation of an algorithm
   that builds a binary tree with minimum weighted path length from
   weighted leaf nodes given in symmetric order. This can be used to build
   optimum search tables, to balance a 'ropes' data structure in an
   optimal way.

   graphviz-2008.9.20. Ivan Miljenovic [26]announced a new version of
   [27]Matthew Sackman's Haskell bindings to Graphviz. See Ivan's original
   announcement for information on what new features are included, and
   what the difference is among the various graphviz-related packages on
   Hackage.

   darcs 2.1.0pre2. Eric Kow [28]announced the release of darcs 2.1.0pre2,
   formerly known as 2.0.3. See Eric's announcement for a list of new
   features and bug fixes in this release.

   protocol-buffers-0.2.9 for Haskell is ready. ChrisK [29]announced the
   release of the [30]protocol-buffers package, which generates Haskell
   data types that can be converted back and forth to lazy ByteStrings
   that interoperate with Google's generated code in C++/Java/python.

   panda blog engine. Jinjing Wang [31]announced the release of [32]panda,
   a simple blog engine written in Haskell.

   OpenSPARC project applicant chosen. Duncan Coutts [33]announced that
   Ben Lippmeier has been chosen for the [34]OpenSPARC project. Ben will
   spend three months hacking on GHC to make it perform well on the latest
   multi-core OpenSPARC chips.

   Hugs on the iPhone. Alberto Galdo [35]announced that he has gotten Hugs
   to run on the iPhone, and has made packages available for others who
   would like to install it as well.

Discussion

   Shooting yourself in the foot in Haskell. John Van Enk [36]asked how to
   shoot yourself in the foot with Haskell, with humorous results.

   Total Functional Programming in Haskell. Jason Dagit started a
   [37]discussion on total functional programming, Haskell, abstraction
   boundaries and the IO monad, and related topics.

   Health effects. Andrew Coppin told a [38]story about a chocolate bar
   and recursion, which led to a discussion of optimization problems,
   Dedekind cuts, some meta-discussion of the discussion, and entirely too
   many puns.

   The container problem. Andrew Coppin [39]asked about the possibility if
   abstracting over various sorts of containers in Haskell, and why there
   isn't a widely used library that does this. A discussion of various
   container libraries and the language issues that arise followed.

   Red-Blue Stack. Matthew Eastman [40]asked how to implement a certain
   data structure (red-blue stacks) in Haskell. Several people responded
   with increasingly clever solutions, and a comparison of mutating vs.
   non-mutating algorithms.

   Climbing up the shootout.... Don Stewart began a long and ongoing
   [41]discussion about improving Haskell's performance on benchmarks in
   the [42]Shootout, now that there is a quad core machine for running
   benchmarks!

   Line noise. Andrew Coppin started an [43]interesting discussion about
   perceptions of Haskell syntax by programmers who aren't familiar with
   it.

Jobs

   London FP job in asset management. Michael Bott [44]announced an
   opportunity for two functional programmers based in London, with a
   software house specialising in asset management.

Blog noise

   [45]Haskell news from the [46]blogosphere.
     * Creighton Hogg: [47]Some first steps with Data.Reactive. Creighton
       gives some simple examples of using Conal Elliott's Reactive
       library. More to come!
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [48]Unix hacking in Haskell: better
       pseudoterminal support.
     * Creighton Hogg: [49]One last thought on laziness. In Creighton's
       opinion, laziness is the single hardest thing to get used to in
       Haskell. If you're learning Haskell, don't despair, break out the
       pencil and paper!
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [50]Animal as RDR, part III.
     * Neil Mitchell: [51]General Updates.
     * Don Stewart (dons): [52]Newest Mersenne Prime. Haskell doesn't even
       break a sweat computing the largest known prime number.
     * Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): [53]Animal as RDR, part II.
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [54]Using Bloom filters for large scale gene
       sequence analysis in Haskell. A paper that Bryan and Ketil Malde
       submitted to PADL 09. "The Cliff's Notes version: Bloom filters are
       almost unused in bioinformatics; they're tremendously useful; and
       our Haskell code is really fast.
     * >>> Zubin Wadia: [55]Simon Peyton Jones & Microsoft Research
       Cambridge. Zubin thinks quite highly of SPJ and MSR Cambridge.
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [56]Slides from my DEFUN 2008 Haskell tutorial.
     * Mads Lindstroem: [57]Inheritance in Composites and Overlapping
       Instances.
     * >>> Micah Cowan: [58]Adventures in Haskell. Micah shares some
       thoughts on learning Haskell.
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [59]Some notes on the future of Haskell and FP.
     * Well-Typed.Com: [60]Slides from the Haskell Platform talk.
     * Paul Johnson: [61]Why the banks collapsed, and how a paper on
       Haskell programming can help stop it happening next time.
     * >>> Nathan Sanders: [62]Two weeks of Haskell. Nathan shares some
       thoughts on his first two weeks learning Haskell.
     * Bryan O'Sullivan: [63]Twittering from ICFP / Haskell symposium /
       CUFP.
     * Real-World Haskell: [64]Slides from ACCU talk.
     * Eric Kow (kowey): [65]darcs weekly news #5.
     * John Goerzen (CosmicRay): [66]New version of datapacker.
     * >>> James Cowie: [67]Haskell, the verdict!. James is impressed with
       Haskell after using it for a few weeks.
     * >>> Alex Combas: [68]What's all this fuss about Haskell?. Alex is
       thinking of learning Haskell in his spare time.
     * Aaron Tomb: [69]Parsing the Linux kernel with Haskell: experience
       with Language.C. Aaron is impressed by the new Language.C
       libraries, which parses all 18 million pre-processed lines of Linux
       kernel source with no problems!

Quotes of the Week

     * Fuse_: Oh, sorry for hijacking mathematical purity with dirty
       fiscal dynamical systems. :o
     * mauke: <mauke> data Mushroom badger = Mushroom badger badger badger
       badger badger badger badger badger badger <leimy> where's the snake
       <mauke> deriving Snake
     * ddarius: higher order of lambdabot deployment and management
       engineers or HOLDME
     * Botje: #haskell: parallellising your homework answers!
     * olsner: most everything gives nicer everything than perl
     * Botje: fuzzy feelings aren't always aerodynamic, unfortunately.
     * chrisdone: benchmarks only exist to make fun of ruby
     * Claus Reinke: [on breaking code up into smaller bits] Once your
       readers understand your code, you can add the one-liner and ask for
       applause.
     * Jake Mcarthur: A fold by any other name would smell as sweet.
     * lispy: Schroedinger's cat is really in a thunk not a box
     * Bulat: Haskell was developed with goal to hide implementation
       details from egg-headed scientists and this obviously should have
       some drawbacks

About the Haskell Weekly News

   New editions are posted to [70]the Haskell mailing list as well as to
   [71]the Haskell Sequence and [72]Planet Haskell. [73]RSS is also
   available, and headlines appear on [74]haskell.org.

   To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
   information on [75]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis
   dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
   [76]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ .

References

   1. http://haskell.org/
   2. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Video_presentations/Haskell_Symposium_2008
   3. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4697764813432201693
   4. 
http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/26/some-notes-on-the-future-of-haskell-and-fp/
   5. 
http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/27/slides-from-my-defun-2008-haskell-tutorial/
   6. http://blog.well-typed.com/2008/09/slides-from-the-haskell-platform-talk/
   7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16443
   8. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/ForSyDe
   9. http://www.ict.kth.se/org/ict/ecs/sam/projects/forsyde/www/
  10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16442
  11. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Graphalyze
  12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16440
  13. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Video_presentations/Haskell_Symposium_2008
  14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/16438
  15. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4697764813432201693
  16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45332
  17. http://happstutorial.com:5001/
  18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45305
  19. http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/store/DeriveBinary.hs
  20. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45272
  21. 
http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/26/some-notes-on-the-future-of-haskell-and-fp/
  22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45185
  23. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/760-New-version-of-datapacker.html
  24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45002
  25. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/garsia-wachs
  26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44863
  27. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/graphviz
  28. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/048094.html
  29. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44845
  30. 
http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/protocol-buffers
  31. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44840
  32. http://jinjing.blog.easymic.com/
  33. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44836
  34. http://haskell.org/opensparc/
  35. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047838.html
  36. http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-October/048506.html
  37. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45393
  38. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45370
  39. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45242
  40. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45122
  41. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44916
  42. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all
  43. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/44886
  44. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/45506
  45. http://planet.haskell.org/
  46. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles
  47. 
http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/09/some-first-steps-with-datareactive.html
  48. 
http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/30/unix-hacking-in-haskell-better-pseudoterminal-support/
  49. 
http://abstractabsurd.blogspot.com/2008/09/one-last-thought-on-laziness.html
  50. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/animal-as-rdr-part-iii.html
  51. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/09/general-updates.html
  52. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2008/09/30#primes
  53. http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/09/animal-as-rdr-part-ii.html
  54. 
http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/28/using-bloom-filters-for-large-scale-gene-sequence-analysis-in-haskell/
  55. http://zwadia.com/?p=58
  56. 
http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/27/slides-from-my-defun-2008-haskell-tutorial/
  57. 
http://lindstroem.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/inheritance-in-composites-and-overlapping-instances/
  58. 
http://micah.cowan.name/2008/09/26/computers/software-development/adventures-in-haskell/
  59. 
http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/26/some-notes-on-the-future-of-haskell-and-fp/
  60. http://blog.well-typed.com/2008/09/slides-from-the-haskell-platform-talk/
  61. 
http://paulspontifications.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-banks-collapsed-and-how-paper-on.html
  62. http://sandersn.com/blog/index.php?title=two_weeks_of_haskell
  63. 
http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/25/twittering-from-icfp-haskell-symposium-cufp/
  64. http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/2008/09/25/slides-from-accu-talk/
  65. http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/09/darcs-weekly-news-5.html
  66. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/760-New-version-of-datapacker.html
  67. http://www.jcowie.co.uk/2008/09/haskell-the-verdict/
  68. http://combas3d.com/2008/09/whats-all-this-fuss-about-haskell/
  69. 
http://www.galois.com/blog/2008/09/17/parsing-the-linux-kernel-with-haskell-experience-with-languagec/
  70. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
  71. http://sequence.complete.org/
  72. http://planet.haskell.org/
  73. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
  74. http://haskell.org/
  75. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
  76. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/
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