Haskell Weekly News: January 3, 2009

Submitted by byorgey on Sat, 01/03/2009 - 12:20pm.
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Haskell Weekly News: January 03, 2009

Welcome to issue 99 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

Happy new year to all! May 2009 be a year full of joy, family, friends, professional success, much Haskell hacking, and a minimal number of rabid weasels. Just in case.

Announcements

#haskell IRC channel reaches 600 users. Don Stewart announced that 7 years after its inception, under the guiding hand of Shae Erisson (aka shapr), the #haskell IRC channel on freenode has reached 600 concurrent users!

citeproc-hs-0.2. andrea rossato announced the release of citeproc-hs-0.2, a Haskell implementation of the Citation Style Language, which adds a Bibtex like citation and bibliographic formatting and generation facility to pandoc. This version adds support for citation collapsing, a wrapper around hs-bibutils, and some API documentation.

hs-bibutils-0.1. andrea rossato announced the first release of hs-bibutils, Haskell bindings to Chris Putnam's bibutils. Bibutils is a library and a set of bibliographic utilities to interconvert between various bibliography database formats using a common MODS-format XML intermediate.

Haskell koans. Gwern Branwen issued an RFK (Request for Koans), following the success of his CFH (Call for Haiku).

[ANN] Haskell web server + wiki: salvia-0.0.4 + orchid-0.0.6. Sebastiaan Visser announced the release of three new packages: salvia, a lightweight modular web server framework; orchid, a(nother) wiki written in Haskell, using Darcs as a versioning back-end and Salvia as the application server; and orchid-demo, a simple demo application using Salvia and Orchid to serve an example darcs repository. You can play around with an online demo.

gitit-0.4.1, recaptcha-0.1. John MacFarlane announced the release of gitit-0.4.1, a wiki program that stores pages in a git repository. This release adds support for (optional) captchas, using the reCAPTCHA service. The reCAPTCHA code has been packaged as a separate library on Hackage, recaptcha.

monte-carlo-0.2, gsl-random-0.2.3. Patrick Perry announced the release of a new version of the monte-carlo package. The new version includes a more general type class, MonadMC, which allows all the functions to work in both MC and MCT monads; functions to sample from discrete distributions, and functions to sample subsets. There is also a quick tutorial.

Reading group for Programming Collective Intelligence. Creighton Hogg announced that he would like to start a small group for the O'Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence, to work through translating some of the examples to Haskell. Email Creighton if you are interested in participating.

Maintaining laziness. Henning Thielemann announced that he has written a tutorial on how to make functions lazy and how to test whether they are actually lazy.

Request for feedback: Understanding Haskell Monads. Ertugrul Soeylemez requested feedback on a new monad tutorial.

Discussion

How do we decide on the new logo?. Fritz Ruehr began a discussion of how to go about choosing a winner of the Great 2009 Haskell Logo Contest. Weigh in if you care!

Jobs

Two Positions as Associate Professor in Software Engineering at Chalmers University. Koen Claessen announced the availability of two positions as Associate Professor at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, within the division of Software Engineering and Technology at the department of Computer Science and Engineering. The application deadline is January 12, 2009.

Blog noise

Haskell news from the blogosphere.

Quotes of the Week

  • lilac: <bohdan> how do I see the number of reductions required to calculate something? <lilac> bohdan: the usual method is to ask Cale to reduce it by hand :)
  • conal: If it's purely functional, how do you *do* anything? You don't ;-)
  • ddarius: The opposite ends of CS meet in the Haskell world.
  • EvilTerran: forcedYet :: a -> Bool; forcedYet x = x `seq` True -- :P
  • bmh: I dream in folds. One day I'll dream in monads.
  • sclv: dreaming is a monad.

About the Haskell Weekly News

New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

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