Haskell News

Convert scribbles into LaTeX symbols using Detexify

2010-12-24T06:06:00.000-08:00

The Detexify web application is an interesting project that allows users to scribble symbols using the mouse and see similar-looking LaTeX symbols. Detexify is written in Haskell.

Microsoft Research may fund real-world adoption of Parallel Haskell

2010-08-07T05:14:00.000-07:00

Duncan Coutts at Well Typed announced earlier this year that Microsoft Research had indicated that they might fund a 2-year project to push real-world use of Parallel Haskell.

The status of this project is not known but this would be an exciting development, not least because Well Typed have a history of attacking Haskell's real barriers to adoption.

"Dynamic Extension of Typed Functional languages" by Don Stewart

2010-08-02T15:41:00.000-07:00

Don Stewart of Galois has kindly made his PhD thesis on the Dynamic Extension of Typed Functional Languages publicly available.

Haskell Platform 2010.2 released with GHC 6.12.3

2010-08-01T11:13:00.001-07:00

A new version of the Haskell Platform was recently released. Excitingly, this is the first release to include a version of GHC that includes bug fixes to the garbage collector that makes the use of mutable arrays feasible including hash tables.

Haskell at Google (Switzerland)

2010-06-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

Iustin Pop, a system administrator at Google Switzerland, is publishing an ICFP experience report about his use of Haskell in a Python project.

Number of Haskell programmers at Credit Suisse falls to zero

2010-04-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the number of Haskell programmers at Credit Suisse has fallen from almost 20 contributors a few years ago to zero full-time Haskell developers today.

According to ITJobsWatch, the number of Haskell jobs in the UK has fallen to its lowest level since 2008 and Haskell's share of the market by programming languages is now only 0.05%. Haskell's market share was most likely lost to F#.

Almost two million lines of Haskell code at Galois

2010-03-12T21:42:00.001-08:00

The world's largest employer of Haskell programmers, Galois, apparently have been involved with almost two million lines of Haskell code.

Haskell moving to an LLVM-based backend

2010-02-19T10:35:00.001-08:00

Haskell's defacto standard implementation GHC is dropping its old C backend in favor of a new LLVM-based backend. LLVM is the backend of choice for a growing number of language implementations including our own HLVM project.

This could have many important ramifications including the ability to create a competitively efficient REPL that would allow Haskell code to be evaluated interactively without the limitations of the current offerings such as ghci.

Experience Report: Haskell in Industry

2010-01-20T09:22:00.000-08:00

Curt Sampson published a report describing the good, the bad and the ugly sides of trying to use Haskell to write production code in industry.

Curt cites brevity, powerful static typing, portability and interoperability among Haskell's advantages but unpredictable performance, memory leaks, lack of good documentation and literature and lack of modern development tools for refactoring and profiling as Haskell's primary weaknesses.

The report is fascinating and a highly recommended read for anyone considering trying to use Haskell outside academia.

Learn you a Haskell for great good: a fantastic tutorial

2009-07-28T04:36:00.001-07:00

In the process of trying to learn the Haskell programming language we stumbled upon a really fantastic tutorial called "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!". This is by far the best tutorial we have ever read on Haskell and, in particular, is infinitely better than any of the books on Haskell including the recent Real World Haskell book.

For anyone wanting to get to grips with the basics of Haskell programming, we highly recommend this resource.

Reviews: Real World Haskell

2009-04-12T04:22:00.001-07:00

The very affordable book Real World Haskell was published at the end of 2008 and initially received universal praise in the Amazon reviews from its home country.

However, far more readers have since written reviews on Amazon in other countries and the impartial site Reddit that were not so positive:

Fortunately, the authors have agreed to write a second edition of the book that will hopefully address all of these issues.

Hash table woes

2009-04-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

Recent performance studies have shown that Haskell's defacto-standard compiler, GHC, still bundles an extremely inefficient hash table implementation. Specifically, the benchmark showed optimized Haskell compiled to native code running even slower than interpreted Python and 32× slower than F#.

Surprisingly, the poor performance turned out to be due to a design flaw in the implementation of GHC's garbage collector that renders it incapable of handling updates to arrays of boxed types efficiently.

Contrary to a statement in the book "Real World Haskell", trees are incapable of providing comparable performance for the majority of use cases. Therefore, it is extremely important that this deficiency is addressed because, without a decent hash table implementation, almost all dictionary data structures will be over an order of magnitude slower in Haskell than other functional languages such as OCaml and F#. Suffice to say, hash tables are an extremely valuable data structure and failing to provide a decent implementation is a serious shortcoming.

Although Haskell programmers have been complaining about the poor performance of its hash tables for at least three years, Donald Stewart has just promised to address the issue by implementing a new and reasonably-performant hash table for GHC.

Lennart Augustsson releases his embedded BASIC

2009-04-08T12:54:00.000-07:00

Lennart Augustsson, author of the world's first Haskell compiler, has released the much-anticipated source code to his BASIC DSL written in Haskell that uses LLVM for JIT compilation.

Lennart has been teasing us with a series of fascinating articles describing the elegant DSL capabilities offered by his latest work and it is great to finally have something to play with!

This project demonstrates how the Haskell programming language combined with FFI bindings to LLVM's C API can be used to construct new language implementations quickly and easily.

Functional languages excel at metaprogramming and there are several similar compilers written in functional languages that are buildinng upon LLVM including our own HLVM project that is written in OCaml and provides a complete high-performance garbage collected virtual machine in under 1,000 lines of OCaml code.

XMonad popularity

2009-03-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

Donald Stewart kindly took the time to analyze and document the download statistics for his xmonad package, a tiling window manager written in Haskell. His results prove that xmonad has been downloaded tens of thousands of times even though the project is not yet 3 years old.

Donald also notes that the number of source downloads dropped dramatically when xmonad became available prepackaged for all mainstream Linux distributions. This indicates that the Debian and Ubuntu popularity contest results (distros that cover over 70% of all Linux users) for xmonad should be accurate estimates for the current number of active xmonad users. According to those results, users are currently running around 180 registered copies of xmonad, making it the second most popular program ever written in Haskell!

Following the success of this analysis, Donald has announced his intention to automate this procedure in order to provide accurate download statistics for the thousands of Haskell packages currently available.

Real World Haskell book out now!

2008-11-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

The highly anticipated book Real World Haskell is flying off the printing press and will be available on the shelves of all good bookstores any day now. Congratulations to the authors Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen!

The functional programming language book market is hotting up now following the release of F# for Scientists and expecting both F# in a Nutshell and Real-world Functional Programming in .NET in the coming months.

Growth of the Haskell job market

2008-07-28T17:09:00.000-07:00

Functional programming languages have been around for a long time, of course, but they have only very recently begun to be adopted for more mainstream programming tasks. This is reflected in the job market and the IT Jobs Watch website does an excellent job of trending the job market over time for different programming languages, including Haskell. The results are surprising:

This shows that, at least in the UK, the Haskell-related job market is growing rapidly: demand for programmers familiar with Haskell been rising steadily since mid-2006 and is now 4× higher than it was then.

Moreover, the range of salaries for job adverts that value Haskell experience is substantially higher than all mainstream languages: £50-68k compared to only £38-45k for C# and £42-52k for Java. As we predicted last year, this trend is driven by employers using programming language diversity as a way to identify superior candidates and this trend is driving more and more young developers to better their programming abilities and job prospects by learning advanced languages like Haskell.

However, Haskell is unlike the other major functional languages because job adverts asking for programmers familiar with Haskell rarely pertain to actual Haskell programming in industry. In contrast, many companies are actually using other functional languages, like OCaml, to build working products. The reason for this is not clear.

Real World Haskell book: draft chapters on-line!

2008-01-21T12:34:00.000-08:00

In May 2007, O'Reilly Media Inc. agreed to publish the book Real World Haskell that covers practical aspects of the functional programming language Haskell. The authors (Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen) have kindly made pre-release versions of many chapters available on-line and are asking potential readers to comment on the current content.

Haskell is one of the world's most popular functional programming languages and this is one of the growing number of books in the mainstream press that cover practical aspects of functional programming. Other recent titles include OCaml for Scientists, Foundations of F# and Expert F# . The book F# for Scientists was also completed last week and should hit the shelves in the coming months.

Top 10 most popular Haskell programs

2008-01-01T22:04:00.001-08:00

Following on from the Christmas favorite top 10 most popular OCaml programs, here is a list of the 10 most popular open source Haskell programs according to the Debian and Ubuntu package popularity contests:

1. Darcs

Darcs is a source code management system with revision control like subversion and mercurial. Unlike the alternatives, darcs is based upon a sophisticated and unique algebra of patches that allows extra features like spontaneous branches.

3,208 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.

2. hpodder

HPodder is a command-line podcatcher, a tool to scan and download podcasts by John Goerzen.

2,028 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.

3. dfsbuild

dfsbuild is a highly-configurable program to generate Debian From Scratch (DFS) CD images, by John Goerzen.

481 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.

4. Pugs

Pugs is an implementation of Perl 6, written in GHC-extended Haskell, that aims to implement the full Perl6 specification.

233 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.

5. srcinst

srcinst is tool used to build and install Debian packages completely from source, by John Goerzen.

133 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.

6. kaya

Kaya is a programming language and implementation with static typing and type inference that is designed to aid in the production of high-quality secure web applications, by the University of Durham.

103 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.

7. xmonad

xmonad is a tiling window manager for X.

95 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.

8. whitespace

Whitespace is an esoteric programming language developed by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris at the University of Durham.

90 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.

9. arch2darcs

arch2darcs is a program for converting Arch repositories to Darcs, written in GHC-extended Haskell by John Goerzen.

82 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.

10. uuagc

The Utrecht University Attribute Grammar System (UUAGC) takes a description of an abstract syntax tree and its semantics, and generates Haskell functions that perform the necessary treewalks.

42 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu.