Haskell Weekly News: February 21, 2009

Welcome to issue 106 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements

HWEB. Eric Macaulay, following a little prodding by Neil Mitchell, has released version 0 of HWEB, a small tool for producing literate Haskell programs.

Cabal-1.6.0.2 and cabal-install-0.6.2. Duncan Coutts announced point-releases of the Cabal library and the cabal-install command line tool. These releases include a number of fixes and minor improvements, and are expected to be included with ghc-6.10.2.

Barrie 0.3.1. Fraser Wilson announced a hackage release of Barrie, an implementation of an idea for supporting state based, user-driven GUIs.

Yogurt-0.3. Martijn van Steenbergen announced the release of Yogurt-0.3, a MUD client library for Haskell. This version improves over 0.2 in several ways, including support for GHC 6.10, no more unsafeCoerce needed, new support for forking threads, and various refactorings.

wxFruit-0.1.2. Henk-Jan van Tuyl announced an update of wxFruit, a graphical user interface that combines some of the power and versatility of wxHaskell with the elegance and simplicity of Fruit. The new version works with GHC 6.10, and also includes a demo game, PaddleBall. Interested parties, take note: the position of developer/maintainer for this library is currently open.

Paper draft: "Denotational design with type class morphisms". Conal Elliott announced a draft of a new paper, "Denotational design with type class morphisms". Feedback is appreciated, especially if in time for the March 2 ICFP deadline.

Crypto 4.2.0 & Related News. Creighton Hogg announced the release of version 4.2.0 of the Crypto library. Creighton will also betaking over maintenance of the library from Dominic Steinitz.

The Typeclassopedia, and request for feedback. Brent Yorgey announced a first draft of an article entitled 'The Typeclassopedia', a "starting point for the student of Haskell wishing to gain a firm grasp of its standard type classes." Comments and feedback are encouraged!

hslibsvm-2.88.0.1 - A FFI binding to LibSVM. S. Guenther announced the hlibsvm package, a set of Haskell bindings to the C++ libsvm library.

spacepart-0.1.0.0 (was called data-spacepart). Corey O'Connor announced a new release of the spacepart package, supporting space-partitioning data structures. The new release includes many bug fixes and some code cleanup.

pqueue-mtl, stateful-mtl. Louis Wasserman announced two new packages, stateful-mtl and pqueue-mtl. stateful-mtl provides an ST monad transformer, several useful operations on generic monad transformers, and a monad transformer intended to cleanly externally wrap operations on a mutable array (including resizing operations). pqueue-mtl provides implementations of several structures supporting a generic 'single-in, single-out' paradigm (encapsulated in a typeclass named Queuelike), including stacks, queues, and several implementations of priority queues.

haha-0.1 - Animated ascii lambda. Sebastiaan Visser announced haha, a very minimal vector based ascii art library written just for fun. If you've always wanted to have a full-color rotating vector based ascii art lambda on your terminal, now is your chance!

Discussion

Darcs and Google Summer of Code. Eric Kow floated the idea of having darcs apply to the Google Summer of Code as a separate mentoring organization, and discussed several ideas for student projects.

Jobs

Postdoctoral Research Position at Yale University. Paul Hudak announced the availability of a postdoctoral research position at Yale University. The successful candidate will apply modern, high-level programming language ideas (such as embodied in Haskell) to help design and implement a language for the control of BGP-based network routers, with the goal of realizing high-level networking protocols for traffic engineering, security, and related networking concerns.

Blog noise

• GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Triage.

• Manuel M T Chakravarty: Mark your Haskell tweets with #haskell.

• Gregg Reynolds: Performance Economics.

• Alex Mason: AVar released (three times).

• Sean Leather: The strict danger of switching from pure to monadic Template Haskell.

• Mads Lindstrom: Using Mutable Arrays for Faster Sorting.

• Conal Elliott: Denotational design with type class morphisms. A draft of Conal's new paper.

• Jesse Andrews: Getting Tiled with XMonad.

• happstack.com: SOCALFP Presentation Slides: "Happstack is better than X".

• Luke Palmer: Dependent types are ridiculously easy.

• GHC / OpenSPARC Project: Thunderbirds are go.

• Brent Yorgey: Typeclassopedia---a generic response.

• Alex Mason: ASTM updates.

• London Haskell Users Group: Lemmih: LHC - past, present and future.

• Eric Kow (kowey): announcing: burrito tutorial support group. Laden with burrito tutorial guilt? The burrito tutorial support group can help.

• Alex Mason: ASTM: redundant STMish fun.

• happstack.com: Announcing the launch of the Patch-Tag blog.

• Colin Ross: XML parsing with Haskell.

• Brent Yorgey: The Typeclassopedia---request for feedback.

• Sean Leather: Incremental fold, a design pattern.

• Manuel M T Chakravarty: Comparison of type families with functional dependencies.. A nice summary comparison of these two Haskell language features.

• Random permutations and sorting: Heinrich Apfelmus.

• A day with xmonad: Colin Adams.

• Antoine Latter: MaybeT - The CPS Version.

• Gregg Reynolds: Intergalactic Telefunctors and Quantum Entanglement.

• Gregg Reynolds: In Praise of Elitism.

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Beyond Monads. A generalization of monads to parameterized monads.

• Well-Typed.Com: Cabal ticket #500.

Quotes of the Week

• KetilMalde: No, those are quite outdated by now. The new horsemen of the programming apocalypse are, of course, IO, MutableState, LazyMemoryLeak, and Bottom.
• skorpan: i love the layout of lyah. makes me feel like having some chunky bacon.
• lilac: * lilac looks forward to Cale explaining category theory by analogy to Call of Duty
• byorgey: _|_ ... is a party pooper
• idnar: enlarge your context in just seven days with all-natural herbal supplements!
• mmorrow: gah, i'm so used to haskell i forgot a return stmt in C and was trying to figure out where the segfault was happening for 20 minutes

About the Haskell Weekly News

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