Haskell Weekly

Issue 38

Welcome to Haskell Weekly! Haskell is an advanced, purely functional programming language. This is a weekly summary of what’s going on in its community. You can subscribe to the email newsletter or the Atom feed.

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News from the Haskell community

  • Brent Yorgey’s new programming languages course

    My new PL course is now finished, and all the course materials are freely available. Working through all the exercises should be a great option for anyone wishing to learn some basics of programming language design and implementation.

  • CLaSH 0.7 released: GHC 8 support and more

    Our company has been hired to do FPGA development work, and best of all, we get to use CLaSH. As a consequence, I cannot put as much time into CLaSH development as during my days as a PhD/PostDoc. However, we do now get to use CLaSH in industry! And as part of the contract there is time to find and fix bugs in CLaSH!

  • safe-prelude: a thought experiment

    This is a thought experiment in a different point in the alternative prelude design space. After my blog post on readFile, I realized I was unhappy with the polymorphic nature of readFile in classy-prelude. Adding that with Haskell Pitfalls I’ve been itching to try something else.

  • Selecting a platform: JavaScript vs Elm vs PureScript vs GHCJS vs Scala.js

    There are not many people who have worked on production applications in multiple frontend FP systems, and lived to tell the tale. So here goes, my guide to selecting a functional programming platform for the browser.

  • The design and use of QuickCheck

    The typical examples you’ll find online have deceptively simple code. The examples make it hard to learn how their succinct tests are possible, and how to customize them when things go wrong. This guide puts it all together piece by piece so you can use QuickCheck with confidence.

  • Monads made difficult

    This is a short, fast and analogy-free introduction to Haskell monads derived from a categorical perspective. This assumes you are familiar with Haskell and basic category theory.

  • Constraint kinds

    In this blog post, I will show some examples of using the ConstraintKinds GHC extension. Classes and contexts were not first-class citizens in Haskell, but the introduction of the Constraint kind has changed this and allows them to be used as parameters of types.

  • Expressive types, not oppressive types

    Uncle Bob looks at advanced type systems and sees them as more oppressive rather than more expressive. Being able to describe whether or not a function can return null is an opportunity, not a constraint.

  • LiquidHaskell

    LiquidHaskell (LH) refines Haskell’s types with logical predicates that let you enforce critical properties at compile time.

Package of the week

This week’s package of the week is dump-core, a GHC plugin for rendering Core.

Send us a message on Twitter to nominate next week’s package!