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On behalf of the Data.Text team, I am delighted to announce the release of preview versions of two new packages: text 0.1 Fast, packed Unicode text support, using a modern stream fusion framework. text-icu 0.1 Augments the text package with comprehensive character set conversion support and normalization (and soon more), via bindings to the ICU library. These packages fill out critical pieces of functionality for the Haskell platform, without compromising on either performance or safety. Stream fusion offers the possibility of writing text manipulation code in a clean, high-level way, with intermediate allocations and traversals being fused away. ...

My friends at Erlang Training and Consulting are running an organising an event in Palo Alto at the end of April: Erlang Factory. If you’re interested in the ferment of ideas and activity around functional programming, this promises to be an exciting occasion. To me, one of the great attractions of the functional programming world is that our cousin communities are friendly to each other, and we’re eager to transfer the most exciting ideas back and forth. In that spirit, I’ll be speaking about Haskell at Erlang Factory: ...

Via the ever industrious Danny O’Brien, we bring to you the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s end-of-year animation. Learn more about this video and support EFF!

Twitter has become quite the hotbed of chatter about functional programming over the past few months, as a substantial number of pretty well known FP people have either been present all along or have signed up recently and started following each other. Here is a list of people I know about who tweet about FP on a semi-regular basis, along with what I think are their main interests. If you want to see the list extended or modified, let me know. ...

A few months ago, I tore the A4 pulley tendon in my right ring finger in a climbing accident. Yesterday, I had it reconstructed (completely ruptured tendons don’t heal) with a graft of tendon from my forearm. I can currently only type with one hand, so if I owe you an email, please be patient. I should get the finger brace off in about 6 weeks, and ought to have somewhat decent use of that finger once more by the spring. I’m looking forward to being able to catch a thrown ball again!

Ketil Malde and I submitted this paper to PADL 09. Updated 2008-10-13: the paper was accepted! Here is the PDF copy. And for the impatient, here is the abstract. Analysis of biological data often involves large data sets and computationally expensive algorithms. Databases of biological data continue to grow, leading to an increasing demand for improved algorithms and data structures. Despite having many advantages over more traditional indexing structures, the Bloom filter is almost unused in bioinformatics. Here we present a robust and efficient Bloom filter implementation in Haskell, and implement a simple bioinformatics application for indexing and matching sequence data. We use this to index the chromosomes that make up the human genome, and map all available gene sequences to it. Our experiences with developing and tuning our application suggest that for bioinformatics applications, Haskell offers a compelling combination of rapid development, quality assurance, and high performance. ...

I’ve posted my slides from tomorrow morning’s Haskell tutorial on Slideshare. (There’s a downloadable PDF version, too, if you find that an easier format to deal with.) I’ve also posted a Mercurial repository of the slide source code, in case anyone would like to cannibalise the slides for their own purposes. Enjoy!

Don Stewart, Duncan Coutts and Simon Marlow ended the Haskell Symposium yesterday with a wonderful session about the future of Haskell. Don and Duncan began with an acknowledgement of the importance of libraries to the health and future of the Haskell language community. A long-standing need for a central source of good libraries was met about 18 months ago with the development of the Hackage package database. Since its introduction, we have already seen roughly 750 open source Haskell packages published. ...