Haskell Weekly News: Issue 180

Welcome to issue 180 of the HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. This release covers the week of April 24 to 30, 2011.

Announcements

Eric Kow suggested the creation of a Haskell User Group starter kit. If you have ideas in this department, please see what Eric has started!

Christopher Done wrote a response to a blog from Cedric entitled "Why Scala's Option and Haskell's Maybe types won't save you from Null." A lively conversation followed.

Henning Thielemann started an very interesting thread with the title "Python is lazier than Haskell." (See the quotes of the week for the full quote)

Quotes of the Week

These quotes are taken from the #haskell channel, and from the haskell/haskell-cafe mailing lists.

• Henning Thielemann: If Haskell is great because of its laziness, then Python must be even greater, since it is lazy at the type level.
• Ben Lippmeier: Laziness at the value level causes space leaks, and laziness at the type level causes mind leaks. Neither are much fun. When people start wanting laziness at the kind level we'll have to quarantine them before the virus spreads...
• Gregg Reynolds: If the designers could find a way to support laziness at the programmer level, I for one would be very grateful.
• Felipe Almeida Lessa: But I am sure that john-millikin-is-great.txt must be increasing like a memory leak ;)
• James Cook: I think Haskell questions on SO tend to the opposite extreme; no matter how poorly thought-out the question, the Haskell community will descend on it like a swarm of helpful piranhas.
• Philippa: C++ seeing a renaissance as a functional language, is this a bit like rusty nails seeing a renaissance as sex toys for masochists?
• #haskell: <aristid> preflex: seen FunctorSalad * preflex_ is now known as preflex. * copumpkin is now known as postflex. * xplat is now known as circumflex. <circumflex> FunctorSalad was never seen on #haskell-world-conquest -4 years, 3 days, 7i minutes and 0 seconds ago, saying: RELEASE THE KRAKEN!
• tolkad: Without a standard you are lost, adrift in a sea of unspecified semantics. Hold fast to the rules of the specification lest you be consumed by ambiguity.
• Saizan: it's much easier via type theory, 1) prove bottom 2) ???? 3) quodlibet
• dons: Think of a monad as a spacesuit full of nuclear waste in the ocean next to a container of apples. Now, you can't put oranges in the space suite or the nuclear waste falls in the ocean, *but* the apples are carried around anyway, and you just take what you need.
• tolkad: Perhaps by using it we could modernise haskell by applying the principles of the new kind of science

Top Reddit Stories

• The Irish Times: "Functional programming is more than just esoteric; it's becoming somewhat cool."
  From (irishtimes.com), scored 44 with 6 comments.
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• Why Silkapp uses Haskell
  From (blog.silkapp.com), scored 43 with 0 comments.
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• Harper again: The real point of laziness
  From (existentialtype.wordpress.com), scored 38 with 89 comments.
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• Patent 5,893,120 reduced to mathematical formulae (via Haskell)
  From (paulspontifications.blogspot.com), scored 34 with 13 comments.
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• IO evaluates the Haskell heap
  From (blog.ezyang.com), scored 33 with 3 comments.
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• Why Haskell?
  From (blog.mired.org), scored 33 with 19 comments.
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• Filter and Visualize Data in Seconds with Silk (Haskell-based startup)
  From (thenextweb.com), scored 33 with 18 comments.
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• Haskell libraries you should use
  From (blog.johantibell.com), scored 29 with 3 comments.
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• Tying the Knot - a really mind bending Haskell technique
  From (haskell.org), scored 27 with 8 comments.
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• haskell.org GSoC accepted projects are up.
  From (self.haskell), scored 26 with 32 comments.
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Top StackOverflow Questions

• What are the best Haskell libraries to operationalize a program? votes: 57, answers: 3
• How do you design programs in Haskell or other functional programming languages? [migrated] votes: 24, answers: 0
• Haskell: why the convention to name a helper function "go"? votes: 22, answers: 3
• What haskell topics need to be addressed in a Real-World-Haskell style? votes: 21, answers: 5
• What are some interesting uses of high order functions? votes: 14, answers: 14
• How are mutable arrays implemented in Haskell? votes: 10, answers: 3
• Performance problem with Euler problem and recursion on Int64 types votes: 10, answers: 6

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