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Now that I’ve got the DEFUN 2009 schedule sorted out (you are coming, aren’t you?), I’ve had time to take a breath and think about the Haskell text library again. Its API is currently a clone of the ancient and venerable Haskell list API. If you’ve used the list API to do much text processing, you’ve probably spilled more than a few tears into your whiskey. The bytestring library also mostly clones the list API, albeit with a few improvements. This state of affairs makes me somewhat sad: here we are with a fabulous language, but a 1991-era API for mangling text. ...

I just released version 0.2 of the Haskell text library that I announced back in February. This version fixes a number of bugs, but much more significantly, it adds a streaming mode: you can process a huge amount of text lazily using a small, fixed amount of memory, while maintaining high performance. In case you need to report problems or suggest improvements, there’s now a Trac instance for the text and text-icu libraries. ...

I had a wonderful time at the Bay Area Erlang Factory this morning, speaking to an Erlang audience about the different perspective that Haskell brings to functional programming. It was a relaxed and friendly crowd, and speaking to a receptive audience is always a thrill. Here are the slides from my talk. The other side of functional programming: Haskell for Erlang people ...

ACM SIGPLAN 2009 Developer Tracks on Functional Programming http://www.defun2009.info/ Edinburgh, Scotland, September 3 and 5, 2009 The workshop will be held in conjunction with ICFP 2009 http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/icfp09.html Important dates Proposal Deadline: June 5, 2009, 0:00 UTC Notification: June 19, 2009 DEFUN 2009 invites functional programmers and researchers who know how to solve problems with functional progamming to give talks and lead tutorials at the The ICFP Developer Tracks. We want to know about your favorite programming techniques, powerful libraries, and engineering approaches you’ve used that the world should know about and apply to other projects. We want to know how to be productive using functional programming, write better code, and avoid common pitfalls. ...

If you’ve looked at the Mercurial book site in the past 24 hours, you’ll have noticed that both its look and the name of the book have changed. First, the cosmetic news. The change in appearance is due to my switching over to the system I used to publish Real World Haskell. I’ve always made the source code to the Mercurial book available, but now it includes the source of the Django app and jQuery code that drives the comment system. So if you’re writing an online book, have at it! ...

I think that this video is remarkably beautiful. SCINTILLATION, by Xavier Chassaing on Vimeo.