Haskell Weekly News: Issue 218

Welcome to issue 218 of the HWN, an issue covering crowd-sourced bits of information about Haskell from around the web. This issue cover the weeks of February 26 to March 10, 2012.

Quotes of the Week

• monochrom: shapr is not "normal". he got a decent job, then went to school.
• quicksilver: typeclasses are absolutely not sugar for a record of functions
  quicksilver: they're unsugar.
  quicksilver: they're a benighted bitter poison.
• edwardk: i'm not willing to give up orders of magnitude worth of performance to get a bad hack
  edwardk: if you want that, go code in scheme
• (on pointless black magic)
  mgsloan: welcome to excessively pointless plumbing operators :)
  byorgey: mgsloan: that's... terrifying
  DanBurton: you should put it on hackage
• cheater_: maybe you should try /part since we're talking about perfect-world situations
• edwardk: i used to be a huge proponent of unicode syntax everywhere, then i used agda ;)
• cmccann: free advice is, of course, any advice which satisfies the properties expected given the definition of "advice", but nothing further ;]
• shachaf: "magic" is just another word for "primitive"
• dylukes: I'm getting way more acquainted with the GHC build system than I'd like to be.
• JoeyA: Inform7 is a programming language.
  A programming language tells a computer what to do.
  The computer is in a room.
  You are facing West.
• mauke: sorry, the current time is not a constant
  lukish: It's a pity
• dfletcher: > ((++" Batman!") . take 48 . cycle . show) (0/0)

Top Reddit Stories

• New unordered-containers release improves performance by as much as 2x, using HAMTs. From (blog.johantibell.com), scored 64 with 46 comments.
• A humble suggestion for visual pure functional programming. From (i.imgur.com), scored 59 with 59 comments.
• Spike: experimental web browser in Haskell. From (self.haskell), scored 53 with 22 comments.
• GHC 7.4.1 speeds up arbtt by a factor of 22. From (joachim-breitner.de), scored 51 with 18 comments.
• Eff 3.0 is out, a functional language with first-class computational effects and handlers (an alternative to monads). From (math.andrej.com), scored 49 with 12 comments.
• What's the most clever piece of Haskell code you know?. From (self.haskell), scored 47 with 64 comments.
• Diagrams 0.5 released: powerful, flexible embedded domain-specific language for creating vector graphics. From (byorgey.wordpress.com), scored 40 with 7 comments.
• Faster Javascript Through Category Theory. From (johnbender.us), scored 39 with 5 comments.
• I'm writing a Haskell book. Almost finished the 3rd chapter. Would like feedback.. From (bit.ly), scored 36 with 48 comments.
• Level 0 -- a Snake clone using SDL, with a nice interactive map editor. From (quasimal.com), scored 28 with 5 comments.
• Parallel Haskell Digest 8: MVar, summer school, Simon PJ @ YOW, and more. From (well-typed.com), scored 27 with 1 comments.
• Avoid cabal hell: find nirvana. From (yesodweb.com), scored 27 with 30 comments.
• Improvements to HashMap and HashSet creation. From (blog.johantibell.com), scored 26 with 1 comments.
• The Day Python Embarassed Imperative Programming -- What, then, Shall We Say?. From (the-27th-comrade.appspot.com), scored 25 with 20 comments.
• Improbable uses of unsafeCoerce. From (gist.github.com), scored 25 with 25 comments.

Top StackOverflow Questions

• Haskell: Lists, Arrays, Vectors, Sequences votes: 32, answers: 1
• Why type classes in Haskell were difficult to implement? votes: 20, answers: 1
• runST and function composition votes: 18, answers: 3
• How do you compute the difference between successive elements of a list of unknown size, functionally? votes: 16, answers: 7
• Do we care about the 'past' in FRP? votes: 16, answers: 1
• "evaluate" function votes: 16, answers: 1
• What's preferred among liftM, lilftA, etc votes: 15, answers: 1
• Name of type pattern: R a b = Q (a -> (R a b,b)) votes: 14, answers: 3
• Haskell offline documentation? votes: 12, answers: 2
• Program design in Haskell: how to do simulation without mutability votes: 12, answers: 3

Until next time,
Daniel Santa Cruz