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\Huge\textbf{Haskell Weekly News}
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Issue 68, January 05, 2008\\
\url{http://sequence.complete.org/}
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\section*{GHC 6.8.2}
The GHC Team announced the release of GHC 6.8.2, featuring optimisation improvements, improvements to ghci and fixes to standalone deriving.
 
\section*{nhc98 1.2 released}
Malcolm Wallace announced the release of nhc98 1.2.
1.20 is a refreshed release with many of the current core library packages included, and a variety of small bugfixes since the last release. It successfully compiles and runs more programs from the nobench suite than jhc, hbc, Hugs, or yhc. It generates an interpreted bytecode that, on the whole runs faster than that generated by Hugs or yhc, and in many cases is also faster than ghci. Although nhc98 is written in Haskell, you don't need an existing Haskell compiler on your platform to build nhc98 - a C compiler will do.  Hence, it is portable to almost any unix-like machine with a 32-bit compatibility mode. Many useful build tools come included: hmake  (the inspiration for ghc --make), hi (interactive read-eval-print, like Hugs or ghci), cpphs (Haskell-aware replacement for cpp) and hsc2hs (preprocessor for FFI code)
 
\section*{darcs 2.0.0pre2}
David Roundy announced the availability of the second prerelease of darcs two, darcs 2.0.0pre2.  This release fixes several severe performance bugs that were present in the first prerelease.  These issues were identified and fixed thanks to the helpful testing of Simon Marlow and Peter Rockai.  We also added support for compilation under ghc 6.4, so even more users should be able to test this release.
 
\section*{The Monad.Reader Issue 9: SoC special}
Wouter Swierstra announced a new issue of The Monad.Reader, a 'Summer of Code Special' - it consists of three articles  from student participants of Google's Summer of Code, describing the  projects they worked on.
 
\section*{What's happening with Haskell? The 13th HCAR}
Andres Loeh announced the 13th edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report
 
\section*{Teach yourself gtk2hs in 21 hours}
Hans van Thiel  announced a Gtk2Hs basics tutorial, based on the Tony Gale and Ian Main GTK+2.0 tutorial, is now available for review and comment.
 
\section*{Minimalistic Haskell blog framework}
Paul Brown announced a lightweight, experimental blog publishing application, perpubplat
 
\section*{atom}
Tom Hawkins announced the release of atom 2007.12; atom is a domain-specific language embedded in Haskell for describing real-time control applications
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\section*{Jobs}
\section*{Prototyping}
Peter Verswyvelen  announced a job using Haskell for prototyping computer animation and games
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\section*{Quotes}
\begin{itemize}
\item \emph{Conal} For me, the heart of functional programming is exactly this separation between model and presentation. The former is naturally functional and compositional, while the latter is often imperative/sequential and not-so-compositional. IO belongs with the latter.
\item \emph{ddarius} has programmed too much in Haskell.  He now produces code that -compiles- and works the first time
\item \emph{disspy} If all you know is C, everything begins to look like a segmentation fault.
\item \emph{markedtrees} (On the city of Haskell) Ah yes, Haskell. Where all the types are strong, all the men carry arrows, and all the children are above average.
\item \emph{ola-bini} Haskell's type system is really nice, for example, but OCaml's really feels like half of it exists just to cover up holes in the other half, I'm half way into Erlang, but for several reasons the language feels very primitive.
\item \emph{so1i.warazd} I'm more and more comfortable spending time with Haskell these days. Haskell may not be the next thing, but whatever the next big thing is, it's probably going to have Haskelly fingerprints all over it?..
\item \emph{sylvan} think that the perceived difficulty in using purely functional programming is probably a bit exaggerated these days, as all it means is 'we're explicit about where side effects occur'
\item \emph{falvo} I really wish that someone would come up with a type-safe replacement for the likes of Python. Oh, wait, it's called Haskell! Unfortunately, I'm forbidden from using Haskell at work. Sigh
\item \emph{Tyler Spaulding} eventually even 'simple' programs will nned multiple threads. Does that mean developers will suddenly flock to Haskell? Again, no. Language designers are well aware of the situation. Sun and Microsoft are constantly working on improving the Java and .NET frameworks. And by the time the average programmer needs it, both will have plenty of support for easy threading
\item \emph{ricky clarkson} Haskell is full of Aha and Hah moments for me
\item \emph{five9a2} Concurrency aside, I find it common to write Haskell code that is as fast as C. It is true that for most things, the C can be tweaked to go a bit faster, but that tweaking needs to be done on a case-by-case basis. In Haskell, it is easier to compose optimized components. Better algorithms beat an optimized compiler any day and using the best algorithms everywhere in C code tends to be painful, error-prone, and usually disparaged as premature optimization.
\item \emph{Jeff Moser} It's been this fear of skills rot that has pushed me to look into Lisp, Haskell, F\#, Erlang, and other languages to avoid The Blub Paradox.
\item \emph{NFJS 2008 predictions} If you've never programmed in Haskell, now's a good time to learn, because those concepts and syntax are fast making their way towards you...
\item \emph{The honey monster} With the advent of multi-core CPUs and the promise of many core processors in the near future it occurrs to me that my interest in functional programming languages could not of happened at a more opportune time. It is not that imperative programming languages are not as capable, merely that functional programming languages seem to be more natural fit
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\textbf{Choose higher order, polymorphic and purely functional. Choose Haskell.} \\
\url{http://haskell.org/} \\
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