--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haskell Weekly News http://sequence.complete.org/hwn/20090523 Issue 119 - May 23, 2009 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to issue 119 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the [1]Haskell community. Announcements GHC porting works again. Ian Lynagh [2]announced that the [3]instructions for porting GHC to a new architecture now work again with the HEAD. If you get stuck when trying to do a port, feel free to ask on cvs-ghc at haskell.org or in #ghc on freenode. 6.10.4 plans. Ian Lynagh [4]announced plans for a 6.10.4 bugfix release of GHC. If you know of any bugs that you think should be looked into for 6.10.4, please let the development team know. The Timber compiler 1.0.3. Johan Nordlander [5]announced the release of version 1.0.3 of the Timber compiler. Timber is a modern language for building event-driven systems, based around the notion of reactive objects. It is also a purely functional language derived from Haskell, although with a strict evaluation semantics. 1.0.3 is a bug fix release, paving the way for future feature releases. mathlink-2.0.0.3. Tracy Wadleigh [6]announced the release of [7]mathlink, a library for writing Mathematica packages in Haskell. One simply writes some functions of type (MLGet a, MLPut b) => a -> IO b and provides a package specification in a simple DSL; the result is a program that exposes functions that can be called from Mathematica. text 0.2, fast and comprehensive Unicode support using stream fusion. Bryan O'Sullivan [8]announced the availability of [9]text 0.2, an efficient Unicode text library that uses stream fusion. New and notable in this release is support for lazy, chunked text, so you can process text files far larger than memory using a small footprint. Haskell Hackathon in Philadelphia. Brent Yorgey [10]announced Hac phi, a Haskell hackathon to be held in Philadelphia in July. Check out the [11]wiki page and add your name if you are interested in attending! More details to follow soon. feed2twitter 0.2 & hackage2twitter 0.2.1. Tom Lokhorst [12]announced the first release of [13]feed2twitter, a library for sending posts from a news feed to Twitter. EsotericBot 0.0.1. spoon [14]announced the release of [15]Esotericbot, a sophisticated, lightweight IRC bot, written in Haskell. atom 0.0.4. Tom Hawkins [16]announced a new release of [17]atom; this version adds an array datatype (A a). Hieroglyph-2.21 and buster, buster-gtk, and buster-network-2.0. Jeff Heard [18]announced new releases of [19]Hieroglyph, [20]buster, [21]buster-gtk, and [22]buster-network, with tons of changes; read Jeff's original announcement for details. TxtSushi 0.1. Keith Sheppard [23]announced the first version of [24]TxtSushi, a collection of command line utilities for processing tab-delimited and CSV files. It includes a utility for doing SQL SELECTs on flat files. Discussion Should exhaustiveness testing be on by default? Don Stewart started a [25]discussion, prompted by a [26]recent blog post, on whether coverage checking should be on by default, and other issues relating to compiler warnings and coding style. Proposal on the platform API policy question. Duncan Coutts [27]proposed a general policy for Haskell Platform release cycles and versioning, based on input from previous discussions. the problem of design by negation. Michael Mossey began a [28]discussion on software design philosophies. "Design by negation" considered harmful? Haskell in 3 Slides. John Van Enk [29]asked for ideas on a 3 to 4 slide introduction to Haskell. What do YOU think should be on those slides? Blog noise [30]Haskell news from the [31]blogosphere. Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them! * Bryan O'Sullivan: [32]Streaming Unicode support for Haskell: text 0.2. * Alex McLean: [33]Haskell hack. Music generation in Haskell. * Well-Typed.Com: [34]Building plugins as Haskell shared libs. A sneak preview of building Haskell shared libraries on Linux. * LHC Team: [35]New release: LHC 0.8. * Mark Wassell: [36]Grapefruit And Glade. * Conal Elliott: [37]The C language is purely functional. * >>> Will Donnelly: [38]Haskell: A Pretty Nice Language. * FP-Syd: [39]Sydney FP Group: FP-Syd #14.. * Dan Piponi (sigfpe): [40]Trace Diagrams with Monads. Quotes of the Week * roconnor: Damn it, I don't know how to make this as slow as python. * koeien: Let's register it [monomorphismrestriction.com] to prevent it from being used ;) * Elly: Rule 1 of malloc is the same as rule 1 of air travel: "Attempt at all costs to keep your number of landings equal to your number of takeoffs." * monochrom: I was trying to design a sensible language... then I downloaded ghc. * conal: The C ADT is implemented simply as String (or char *, for you type theorists, using a notation from Kleene) * Will Donnelly: monads are okay after a bit (though I'm still a little suspicious of them) About the Haskell Weekly News New editions are posted to [41]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [42]the Haskell Sequence and [43]Planet Haskell. [44]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on [45]haskell.org. To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on [46]how to contribute. Send stories to byorgey at cis dot upenn dot edu. The darcs repository is available at darcs get [47]http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ . References 1. http://haskell.org/ 2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/16984 3. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Porting 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/16972 5. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17200 6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17197 7. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/mathlink 8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58862 9. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/text 10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58817 11. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hac_%CF%86 12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58801 13. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/feed2twitter 14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58796 15. http://www.killersmurf.com/projects/esotericbot 16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58752 17. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/atom 18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58683 19. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Hieroglyph 20. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/buster 21. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/buster-gtk 22. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/buster%2Dnetwork 23. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58635 24. http://www.keithsheppard.name/txt-sushi 25. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/16926 26. http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/64 27. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/11145 28. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58784 29. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/58664 30. http://planet.haskell.org/ 31. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles 32. http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2009/05/22/streaming-unicode-support-for-haskell-text-02/ 33. http://yaxu.org/haskell-hack/ 34. http://blog.well-typed.com/2009/05/buildings-plugins-as-haskell-shared-libs/ 35. http://lhc-compiler.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-release-lhc-08.html 36. http://www.poundstone.org/blog/?p=231 37. http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functional/ 38. http://willdonnelly.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/haskell-a-pretty-nice-language/ 39. http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/FP-Syd/fp-syd-14.html 40. http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/05/trace-diagrams-with-monads.html 41. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell 42. http://sequence.complete.org/ 43. http://planet.haskell.org/ 44. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed 45. http://haskell.org/ 46. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN 47. http://code.haskell.org/~byorgey/code/hwn/ _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell