# News aggregator

### Reminder: 10 days to submit talks to CUFP 2016

haskell-cafe - Tue, 06/14/2016 - 4:08pm
This CFP and the form for submitting presentation proposals can be found at: http://cufp.org/2016/call-for-presentations.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2016 Call for Presentations Workshop for Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2016 Sponsored by SIGPLAN CUFP 2016 Co-located with ICFP 2016 Nara, Japan September 22-24 Talk Proposal Submission Deadline: 24 June 2016 The annual CUFP event is a place where people can see how others are using functional programming to solve real world problems; where practitioners meet and collaborate; where language designers and users can share ideas about the future of their favorite language; and where one can learn practical techniques and approaches for putting functional programming to work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Giving a CUFP Talk If you have experience using functional languages in a practical setting, we invite you to submit a proposal to give a talk at the event.
Categories: Offsite Discussion

### Douglas M. Auclair (geophf): May 2016 1Liners

Planet Haskell - Tue, 06/14/2016 - 2:46pm
One-liners
• May 24th, 2016:
Given f :: a -> [a] -> b, g :: a -> c
Write h :: c -> [c] -> b, point-free, in terms of f and g
where h x y = f (g x) (map g y)
• May 16th, 2016: The next 3 #1Liner are of a piece, using
data CmpV a =
Vec { len :: Int, top :: a,  elts :: [a],
cmp :: CmpV a -> CmpV a -> Ordering }
• Give the point-free definition of:
twoVs :: CmpV a -> CmpV b -> ([a], [b])
• instance Ord (CmpV a) where
compare v1 = uncurry (cmp v1) .  (v1,)
Make compare point-free by removing v1 from above definition
• An Ord-instance needs an Eq-instance:
instance Eq a => Eq (CmpV a) where
v1 == v2 = elts v1 == elts v2
point-free-itize (==)
• May 16th, 2016: You have the following lambda:
\x y -> x == y || fn x y
where fn :: a -> a -> Bool
Point-free-itize
• obadz @obadzz without any fancy uses of the (a ->) Applicative :)
curry $foldr (||) False . flip map [(==), fn] . flip uncurry • obadz @obadzz with fancy use of (a ->) Applicative :) curry$ liftA2 (||) (uncurry (==)) (uncurry fn)
• Noah Luck Easterly @walkstherain
curry $uncurry (||) . (uncurry (==) &&& uncurry fn) • May 5th, 2016: sames :: Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> Int Counts equal values at the same indices in two lists. What is the point-free definition? • joomy @cattheory sames = curry (length . filter (uncurry (==)) . uncurry zip) • bazzargh @bazzargh and then Fatih Karakurt @karakfa ((length . filter id) .) . zipWith (==) • me: sum <<- fromenum="" li="" nbsp="" zipwith=""> • Noah Luck Easterly @walkstherain sames = ((sum . map fromEnum) .) . zipWith (==) • getSum . foldMap (Sum . fromEnum) seems better than foldr (bool id succ) 0 but both satisfy [Bool] -> Int • Андреев Кирилл @nonaem00 let it = (length .) . (filter id .) . zipWith (==) Categories: Offsite Blogs ### Roman Cheplyaka: Predicting a coin toss Planet Haskell - Tue, 06/14/2016 - 2:00pm I flip a coin and it comes up heads. What is the probability it will come up heads the next time I flip it? “Fifty percent,” you say. “The coin tosses are independent events; the coin doesn’t have a memory.” Now I flip a coin ten times, and ten times in a row it comes up heads. Same question: what is the probability it will come up heads the next time? You pause for a second, if only because you are not used to getting heads ten times in a row. But, after some hesitation, you convince yourself that this is no different from the first experiment. The coin still has got no memory, and the chances are still 50-50. Or you become suspicious that something is not right with the coin. Maybe it is biased, or maybe it has two heads and no tails. In that case, your answer may be something like 95% for heads, where the remaining 5% account for the chance that the coin is only somewhat biased and tails are still possible. This sounds paradoxical: coin tosses are independent, yet the past outcomes influence the probability of the future ones. We can explain this by switching from frequentist to Bayesian statistics. Bayesian statistics lets us model the coin bias (the probability of getting a single outcome of heads) itself as a random variable, which we shall call $$\theta$$. It is random simply because we don’t know its true value, and not because it varies from one experiment to another. Consequently, we will update its probability distribution after every experiment because we gain more information, not because it affects the coin itself. <figure> </figure> Let $$X_i\in\{H,T\}$$ be the outcome of $$i$$th toss. If we know $$\theta$$, we automatically know the distribution of $$X_i$$: $p(X_i=H|\theta)=\theta.$ As before, the coin has no memory, so for any given $$\theta$$, the tosses are independent: $$p(X_i \wedge X_j|\theta)=p(X_i|\theta)p(X_j|\theta)$$. But they are independent only when conditioned on $$\theta$$, and that resolves the paradox. If we don’t assume that we know $$\theta$$, then $$X$$s are dependent, because the earlier observations affect what we know about $$\theta$$, and $$\theta$$ affects the probability of the future observations. A model with conditionally independent variables is called a Bayesian network or probabilistic graphical model, and it can be represented by a directed graph as shown on the right. The arrows point from causes to effects, and the absence of an edge indicates conditional independence. Based on our evidence of 10 heads in a row, the Bayes’ theorem lets us estimate the distribution of $$\theta$$. All we need is a prior distribution – what did we think about the coin before we tossed it? For coin tossing and other binary problems, it is customary to take the Beta distribution as the prior distribution, as it makes the calculations very easy. Often such choice is justified, but in our case it would be a terrible one. Almost all coins we encounter in our lives are fair. To make the beta distribution centered at $$\theta=0.5$$ and low variance, we would need to set its parameters, $$\alpha$$ and $$\beta$$, to large equal numbers. The resulting distribution would assign non-trivial probability only to low deviations from $$\theta=0.5$$, and the distribution would be barely affected by our striking evidence. <figure> </figure> Instead, let’s engineer our prior distribution from scratch. Double-sided coins may be rare in everyday life, but they are easy to buy on eBay. When someone approaches us out of the blue and starts flipping coins, there’s a fair chance they’ve got one of those. Still, we believe in humanity, so let’s assign a point probability of just $$1\%$$ to $$\theta=0$$ and $$\theta=1$$. What about biased coins, such as coins with $$\theta=0.83$$? Turns out they are unlikely to exist. Nevertheless, the Bayesian statistics teaches to be reluctant to assign zero probabilities to events, since then no amount of evidence can prove us wrong. So let’s take $$0.1\%$$ and spread it uniformly across the interval $$[0;1]$$. The remaining $$97.9\%$$ will be the probability of a fair coin. Formally, our prior distribution over $$\theta$$ can be specified by its probability density as $p(\theta)=0.979\delta(\theta-0.5)+0.01\delta(\theta)+0.01\delta(\theta-1)+0.001,$ where $$\delta$$ is the Dirac delta function used to specify point probabilities. Let $$D$$ refer to the event that $$X_i=H$$, $$i=1,2,\ldots,10$$. Then $$p(D|\theta)=\theta^{10}$$. By Bayes’ theorem, $p(\theta|D)=\frac{p(D|\theta)p(\theta)}{\int_0^1 p(D|\theta)p(\theta)d\theta} = \frac{\theta^{10}p(\theta)}{\int_0^1 \theta^{10}p(\theta)d\theta}.$ Now we need to do a bit of calculation by hand: $\begin{multline} \int_0^1 \theta^{10}p(\theta)d\theta=0.979\cdot0.5^{10}+0.01\cdot 1^{10}+0.01 \cdot 0^{10} + 0.001\int_0^1 \theta^{10}d\theta \\ = 9.56\cdot 10^{-4} + 0.01 + 9.09\cdot 10^{-5}=0.0110; \end{multline}$ $p(\theta|D)=0.087\delta(\theta-0.5)+0.905\delta(\theta-1)+0.091\theta^{10}.$ Thus, we are $$90.5\%$$ sure that the coin is double-headed, but we also allow $$8.7\%$$ for pure coincidence and $$0.8\%$$ for a biased coin. <figure> </figure> <figure> </figure> Now back to our question: how likely is it that the next toss will produce heads? $\begin{multline} p(X_{11}=H|D) = \int_0^1 p(X_{11}=H|D,\theta)p(\theta|D)d\theta = \int_0^1 \theta \, p(\theta|D)d\theta \\ = 0.087\cdot 0.5+0.905\cdot 1+0.091\cdot \int_0^1\theta^{11}d\theta = 0.956. \end{multline}$ Very likely indeed. Notice, by the way, how we used the conditional independence above to replace $$p(X_{11}=H|D,\theta)$$ with $$p(X_{11}=H|\theta)=\theta$$. Bayesian statistics is a powerful tool, but the prior matters. Before you reach for the conjugate prior, consider whether it actually represents your beliefs. A couple of exercises: 1. How does our prior distribution change after a single coin toss (either heads or tails)? 2. How does our prior distribution change after ten heads and one tails? Categories: Offsite Blogs ### Package takeover (also: the future of Netwire) haskell-cafe - Tue, 06/14/2016 - 1:30pm Hi everybody, I'd like to take over the following Hackage packages with my account named [esz]: * acme-schoenfinkel, * cascading, * continue, * contstuff-monads-tf, * contstuff-transformers, * contstuff, * dnscache, * fastirc, * ihttp, * instinct, * ismtp, * netlines, * netwire, * quickset, * web-page, * webwire, * yesod-tableview. These are actually already mine, but because my old account has become practically inaccessible, I'm now following the official [takeover procedure], asking myself whether I'm okay with that. =) After the takeover, I'm going to deprecate the following packages, unless someone would like to take over maintenance: * cascading: Clay is more comprehensive and easier to use. * contstuff*: Childhood experiments, because after writing a monad tutorial of course you must write an mtl replacement. * dnscache: Useful library, but needs maintenance. * fastirc: irc is reasonably efficient now (it used to be a String parser). * ihttp Categories: Offsite Discussion ### Philip Wadler: Naomi Klein: The Best is Yet to Come Planet Haskell - Tue, 06/14/2016 - 9:22am Amidst all the bad news, Naomi Klein shines a ray of light. Taken together, the evidence is clear: The left just won. Forget the nomination—I mean the argument. Clinton, and the 40-year ideological campaign she represents, has lost the battle of ideas. The spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of data. What for decades was unsayable is now being said out loud—free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy. And the crowds are cheering. With so much encouragement, who knows what’s next? Reparations for slavery and colonialism? A guaranteed annual income? Democratic worker co-ops as the centerpiece of a green jobs program? Why not? The intellectual fencing that has constrained the left’s imagination for so long is lying twisted on the ground. ... Looking beyond this election cycle, this is actually good news. If Sanders could come this far, imagine what a left candidate who was unburdened by his weaknesses could do. A political coalition that started from the premise that economic inequality and climate destabilization are inextricable from systems of racial and gender hierarchy could well build a significantly larger tent than the Sanders campaign managed to erect. And if that movement has a bold plan for humanizing and democratizing new technology networks and global systems of trade, then it will feel less like a blast from the past, and more like a path to an exciting, never-before-attempted future. Whether coming after one term of Hillary Clinton in 2020, or one term of Donald Trump, that combination—deeply diverse and insistently forward-looking—could well prove unbeatable. Categories: Offsite Blogs ### Philip Wadler: Scientists for EU Planet Haskell - Tue, 06/14/2016 - 9:06am Scientists for EU wrote a cogent letter explaining how the EU advances UK science, and how UK science advantages the UK. You can sign it here. Please read this letter, add your name and share this link with other scientists. Scientific advance and innovation are critically dependent on collaboration. To remain a world-leading science nation, we must be team players. The EU leads the world in science output, is beating the US in science growth – and is rapidly increasing investment in research. The EU is a science superpower. Our place in this team has boosted our science networking, access to talent, shared infrastructure and UK science policy impact. The economy of scale streamlines bureaucracy and brings huge added value for all. International collaborations have 40% more impact than domestic-only research. Strong science is key for our economy and quality of life. It creates a virtuous cycle, leveraging investment from industry, raising productivity and creating high-value jobs for our future. In fact, 20% of UK jobs currently rely on some science knowledge. Science brings better medicines, cleaner energy, public health protections, a safer environment, new technologies and solutions to global challenges. If we leave the EU, the UK will lose its driving seat in this world-leading team. Free-flow of talent and easy collaboration would likely be replaced by uncertainty, capital flight, market barriers and costly domestic red-tape. This would stifle our science, innovation and jobs. It is no surprise that a recent survey showed 93% of research scientists and engineers saying the EU is a “major benefit” to UK research. The surprise is that many voters are still unaware that UK science and its benefits would be demoted by a vote to leave. We, the undersigned, urge you to seriously consider the implications for UK science when you vote in the referendum on UK membership of the EU. Categories: Offsite Blogs ### Philip Wadler: A week of cycling ideas from Copenhagen Planet Haskell - Tue, 06/14/2016 - 8:26am People for Bikes is visiting Copenhagen to learn about its famous cycling infrastructure. A week of stories is archived here, including The Great Copenhagen Loading Zone Compromise and How bikes make Copenhagen's neighbourhood business districts thrive. Categories: Offsite Blogs ### CUFP 2016 Call For Tutorials haskell-cafe - Tue, 06/14/2016 - 7:50am Hi all, The Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) 2016 has its Call for Tutorials open for submission. CUFP 2016 is being held in the historic city of Nara, Japan. The conference is devoted to showcase the state of the art of Functional Programming on industrial settings. This conference is co-located with the International Conference of Functional Programming (ICFP). We're looking for tutors that would like to host workshops on on the following themes: - Introductions to functional programming languages. In the past we have had sessions of Clojure, Erlang, F#, F*, Haskell, ML, OCaml, Scala, Scheme and others. - Advanced programming languages, concepts and applications (e.g. Lens, Liquid-Haskell, Agda, Idris, etc.) - Applying functional programming in particular areas, including Web, high-performance computing, finance. - Tools and techniques supporting state of the art functional programming. In the past we have had tutorials on QuickCheck, Elm and others. - Theory. Type theory, categor Categories: Offsite Discussion ### LOPSTR'16: Final Call for Papers and *Deadline Extension* General haskell list - Mon, 06/13/2016 - 9:24pm [ Please distribute, apologies for multiple postings. ] ====================================================================== LOPSTR 2016: Final Call for Papers / Deadline Extension ====================================================================== 26th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation LOPSTR 2016 http://cliplab.org/Conferences/LOPSTR16/ Edinburgh, UK, September 6-8, 2016 (co-located with PPDP 2016 and SAS 2016) ====================================================================== NEW DEADLINES: Abstract submission (extended): June 20, 2016 Paper/Extended abstract submission (extended): June 27, 2016 ====================================================================== INVITED SPEAKERS: Francesco Logozzo (Facebook, USA) [jointly with PPDP] Greg Morrisett (Cornell University, USA) [jointly with PPDP] Martin Vec Categories: Incoming News ### Two Lectureships (Assistant Professorships) at St Andrews General haskell list - Mon, 06/13/2016 - 10:09am We have two vacancies at St Andrews. These are fixed term (3 years), but we are likely to have permanent positions in time. We are looking for good researchers. I would welcome applications from the functional programming community. The deadline is June 29th. See: http://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/2016/05/30/fixed-term-lectureships-in-computer-science/ for details. Best Wishes, Kevin PS If you are sending mail to kh< at >cs.st-andrews.ac.uk, you may get a bounce message. I should still have received your email despite the error message. For future mail, the best and most reliable email address to use is kevin< at >kevinhammond.net -please update your address book. -------- Kevin Hammond, Professor of Computer Science, University of St Andrews T: +44-1334 463241 F: +44-1334-463278 W: http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~kh In accordance with University policy on electronic mail, this email reflects the opinions of the individual concerned, may contain confidential or copyright information that sho Categories: Incoming News ### CMM-to-ASM: Register allocation wierdness glasgow-user - Sun, 06/12/2016 - 7:38pm Hi, I am implementing unicode normalization in Haskell. I challenged myself to match the performance with the best C/C++ implementation, the best being the ICU library. I am almost there, beating it in one of the benchmarks and within 30% for others. I am out of all application level tricks that I could think of and now need help from the compiler. I started with a bare minimum loop and adding functionality incrementally watching where the performance trips. At one point I saw that adding just one 'if' condition reduced the performance by half. I looked at what's going on at the assembly level. Here is a github gist of the assembly instructions executed in the fast path of the loop, corresponding cmm snippets and also the full cmm corresponding to the loop: https://gist.github.com/harendra-kumar/7d34c6745f604a15a872768e57cd2447 I have annotated the assembly code with labels matching the corresponding CMM. With the addition of another "if" condition the loop which was pretty simple till now suddenly got Categories: Offsite Discussion ### [ANN] aivika-lattice-0.1 haskell-cafe - Sun, 06/12/2016 - 2:35pm Hi Cafe, I’m glad to introduce a complete new module aivika-lattice [1] for the Aivika simulation library. It allows running nested discrete event simulations within lattice. If the naive approach implies that traversing the nested simulation nodes has an exponential complexity, then the lattice approach gives us a quadratical growth. This is a key feature, which makes the traversing a computationally feasible task even for a large size lattice. It can be useful for financial modeling, for instance. The model can be divided into two different parts. The first part is a discrete event simulation that branches in the lattice nodes. Within this simulation, we can update a mutable reference that can be observed in another part of the model. For example, such a reference can store a value of the modeled interest rate, or stock price, or exchange rate. It is important that the first part is forward traversing, when the time increases from the past to the future. The first part can even include discontinuous p Categories: Offsite Discussion ### Philip Wadler: David Turner Festschrift Planet Haskell - Sun, 06/12/2016 - 1:12pm Your chance to submit to a Festschrift for David Turner. Categories: Offsite Blogs ### Philip Wadler: A busy summer Planet Haskell - Sun, 06/12/2016 - 11:59am I'll be speaking at the following events. Hope to see you at one of these! Categories: Offsite Blogs ### left to right pipeline of functions haskell-cafe - Sun, 06/12/2016 - 6:46am Hi, I am learning about monads, and this question came to mind: is there a way to have a sequence of functions left to right like so: g = return 2 >>= \n -> return (n + 1) >>= \n -> return (n + 3) Either: some kind of generic monad that makes this legal, or some way to do this without monad (i.e., without the "returns"). Categories: Offsite Discussion ### Allow extra commas in module declarations or lists? glasgow-user - Sat, 06/11/2016 - 8:12pm Some languages like Perl allow you to include additional commas in your lists, so that you can freely reorder them without worrying about adding or removing commas from the last or first item: my < at >array = ( 1, 2, 3, ); Perl even allows multiple redundant commas everywhere after the first element, which is less useful but has come up on occasion: my < at >array = (1,,,2,,,,,,,,,3,,,,,); I propose allowing an optional single extra comma at the end in module declarations, record declarations, record constructors, and list constructors: module Example ( module Example, SomeConstructor(..), ) where data SomeConstructor = SomeConstructor { foo :: Int, bar :: Int, } baz :: SomeConstructor -> SomeConstructor baz x = x { foo = 5, bar = 10, } qux :: [ Int ] qux = [ 1, 2, 3, ] What do you think? _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users< at >haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users Categories: Offsite Discussion ### CFP: DEADLINE APPROACHING - MSWiM 2016 General haskell list - Sat, 06/11/2016 - 2:56pm =================================================== Call-For-Papers: 19th ACM/IEEE MSWiM 2016 Malta, Nov 13-17, 2016 http://www.mswimconf.com/2016 ==================================================== IMPORTANT: Submission deadline Extended: Paper registration through EDAS: June 12th, 2016 Paper Submission: June 12th, 2016 =================================================== ------ ACM/IEEE* MSWiM 2016 is the 19th Annual International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems. MSWiM is an international forum dedicated to in-depth discussion of Wireless and Mobile systems, networks, algorithms and applications, with an emphasis on rigorous performance evaluation. MSWiM is a highly selective conference with a long track record of publishing innovative ideas and breakthroughs. MSWiM 2016 will be held Malta, Nov 13-17, 2016 Authors are encouraged to submit full papers presenting new research related to the theory or pra Categories: Incoming News ### Neil Mitchell: js-jquery 3.0.0 now out Planet Haskell - Sat, 06/11/2016 - 9:08am The js-jquery Haskell library bundles the minified jQuery Javascript code into a Haskell package, so it can be depended upon by Cabal packages and incorporated into generated HTML pages. It does so in a way that doesn't require each Haskell package to bundle its own extra data files, and in a way that meets the licensing requirements of distributions such as Debian. I've just released version 3.0.0, following on from jQuery 3.0.0 a few days ago. This release breaks compatibility with IE6-8, so if that's important to you, insert an upper bound on the package. Categories: Offsite Blogs ### Call pattern specialization limit messages haskell-cafe - Sat, 06/11/2016 - 4:32am When I compile Data.Sequence with -dppr-debug, I get several messages about constructor specialization exceeding the call pattern limit. Things like SpecConstr Function ‘$j_ssfy{v} [lid]’ has four call patterns, but the limit is 3 Use -fspec-constr-count=n to set the bound Specialisations: [([sc_sAZr{v} [lid]], [sc_sAZr{v} [lid], lvl_sdmH{v} [lid]]), ([sc_sAZs{v} [lid]], [sc_sAZs{v} [lid], lvl_sw9X{v} [lid]]), ([sc_sAZt{v} [lid]], [sc_sAZt{v} [lid], lvl_swa0{v} [lid]]), ([sc_sAZu{v} [lid]], [sc_sAZu{v} [lid], lvl_swat{v} [lid]])] How can I figure out what function this sort of thing is actually talking about? I'd love to see what benchmarks say about whether tweaking -fspec-constr-count is a good idea, but I don't know what to benchmark. Thanks, David _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe< at >haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo
Categories: Offsite Discussion

### All-fail case in asum

haskell-cafe - Fri, 06/10/2016 - 3:37pm
Hello I want to define some parser such way: myParser = tryA <|> tryB <|> fail "input must be either A or B" It works. But then I want to rewrite it with asum: myParser = asum [tryA, tryB, fail "must be A or B"] It works, but the wrong way. Instead of my error it writes "empty". Just "empty". It is so because in base library asum = foldr (<|>) empty What if it was defined asum [] = empty asum [x:xs] = x <|> asum xs It would help me with my parser. But what can this break? Why isn't this done yet?
Categories: Offsite Discussion