Haskell Weekly News: Issue 220

Welcome to issue 220 of the HWN, an issue covering crowd-sourced bits of information about Haskell from around the web. This issue covers the week of March 18 to 24, 2012.

Quotes of the Week

• shachaf: Type classes are a scary story that you tell new Haskellers so they can go to sleep at night.
• acowley: Parametric polymorphism is the inspiring story you tell them to get them riled up and raring to go. It's like Braveheart for programmers.
• monochrom: the purpose of types is to ban more programs
• rostayob: I was a type constructor, then I took an arrow in the kind
• shachaf: @let otherfoolish = not otherwise
• flebron: Monoidal objects in the monoidal category of endofunctors on a category. I took a small detour through tensor products to understand monoidal categories better, with one example of such a product.
  mauke: I have no idea what you just said
• weexplat: starts a proposal to replace launchMissiles with atomicDestroyBiosphere
• monochrom: rumour: SPJ will write a thick book "A New Science of Kind"
• JonathanShapiro: [on abandoning BitC] "And I *still* don't believe in monads. :-)"

Top Reddit Stories

• Starting the Mezzo Haskell Book. From (yesodweb.com), scored 58 with 28 comments.
• First patches for iPhone cross compiler against GHC head. From (haskell.org), scored 55 with 27 comments.
• Retrospective thoughts on BitC by its author, and why type classes didn't work for him. From (coyotos.org), scored 44 with 22 comments.
• Google Summer of Code 2012 - Haskell.org is participating. From (haskell.org), scored 42 with 11 comments.
• Conduits vs. Pipes. Using Void as an Input or Output type can reduce the number of concepts (source, sink, conduit) from 3 to 1 (pipe).. From (twanvl.nl), scored 34 with 50 comments.
• Announcing conduit 0.3. From (yesodweb.com), scored 33 with 9 comments.
• Haskell for embedded domain-specific languages (Functional Programming eXchange 2012). From (skillsmatter.com), scored 31 with 4 comments.
• Domain theory course. From (cs.nott.ac.uk), scored 31 with 5 comments.
• ANNOUNCE: options, an easy-to-use command-line option parser. From (self.haskell), scored 29 with 21 comments.
• A Case Study in Creating Rich Internet Apps in Haskell (Silk at FP eXchange 2012). From (skillsmatter.com), scored 22 with 18 comments.
• It just occurred to me that (lift .) defines a functor.... From (self.haskell), scored 22 with 15 comments.

Top StackOverflow Questions

• Haskell platform: nested functions and optimization votes: 15, answers: 2
• newtype with RankNTypes votes: 14, answers: 2
• Pattern Matching - Prolog Vs Haskell votes: 13, answers: 4
• How does this definition of ArrowLoop.loop work? votes: 13, answers: 2
• Data.Set : does it always know best? votes: 12, answers: 2
• Building a histogram with haskell, many times slower than with python votes: 11, answers: 3
• What is the scope of let when used without in? votes: 11, answers: 2
• Strange “half to even” rounding in different languages [closed] votes: 11, answers: 3
• Practical reasons for Сhurch Encoding votes: 10, answers: 1
• Can the FFI deal with arrays? If so, how? votes: 9, answers: 3

Until next time,
Daniel Santa Cruz