Haskell Weekly News: Issue 178

Welcome to issue 178 of the HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. This release covers the week of April 10 to 16, 2011.

Announcements

Simon Marlow commented on plans to have a Hackathon at MSR Cambridge this summer.

Dr. Heinrich Hordegen informed us of the creation of a Munich funtional programmers' user group. Help us spread the word to anyone interested in functional programming in general.

Eric Y. Kow announced the creation of the parallel-haskell mailing list. "The group exists to bring together the various groups in the Haskell community that are working on parallelism. It is intended to provide some visibility into the various efforts and to encourage collaboration."

Don Stewart announced the release of the Haskell Platform 2011.2.0.1. "This release adds support for GHC 7.0.3, and significant improvements for Mac OS X users."

Quotes of the Week

• Gregory Collins: "Easy to use" and "high performance" don't have to be contradictory, but you shouldn't neglect the latter.
• xplat: haskell is good for portability. it can run well on any sort of x86 unix, which is all there is after all.
• Spockz: it's just that my first name isn't Simon so I'm not allowed to use unsafePerformIO :P
• djahandarie: Category theorists are morphisms for turning cofree theorems into free theorems.
• monochrom: lambdabot is partially broken and partially correct when it comes to utf-8
• mm_freak: > case analysis of syntax -> bullshit <lambdabot> True

Top Reddit Stories

• Simon Peyton-Jones -- A Taste Of Haskell
  From (ontwik.com), scored 57 with comments.
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• Really, HaskellWiki, really?
  From (i.imgur.com), scored 43 with 13 comments.
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• Haskell Platform 2011.2.0.1 is out -- major improvements for Mac users
  From (hackage.haskell.org), scored 39 with 9 comments.
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• Tracing the compilation of Hello Factorial in GHC
  From (blog.ezyang.com), scored 36 with 1 comments.
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• acid-state: use regular Haskell data structures without worrying about data loss or durability
  From (haskell.org), scored 32 with 5 comments.
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• Persistence of Memory: persistent vs ephemeral data structures
  From (existentialtype.wordpress.com), scored 28 with 5 comments.
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• Bugs from using the wrong variable
  From (blog.ezyang.com), scored 26 with 11 comments.
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• Cost of calling Haskell from C?
  From (stackoverflow.com), scored 20 with 1 comments.
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• Comparing Snap and Yesod
  From (stackoverflow.com), scored 19 with 4 comments.
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• Announcing: Heist v0.5.1
  From (snapframework.com), scored 17 with comments.
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Top StackOverflow Questions

• Comparing Haskell's Snap and Yesod web frameworks votes: 28, answers: 4
• Haskell library for 2D drawing votes: 19, answers: 4
• One REPL to bind them all? votes: 19, answers: 3
• Performance considerations of Haskell FFI / C? votes: 16, answers: 4
• What is Haskell's style of polymorphism? votes: 13, answers: 1

About the Haskell Weekly News

To help create new editions of this newsletter, please send stories to dstcruz@gmail.com.

Until next time,
Daniel Santa Cruz