I hacked together a quick plugin for the most excellent gitit wiki today. It’s written in Haskell, so it’s an absolute pleasure to write code for it.

I’ve been learning Mandarin Chinese this year, and I’ve just finished a truly excellent book on the subject: Remembering The Hanzi, by Heisig and Richardson. The basic premise of this book is to introduce a system of mnemonic “stories” around each of the characters of the Chinese writing system which help you remember how to draw the character.

Various people, notably John Meacham, have proposed adding “context aliases” to Haskell. The basic idea is that you could write declarations like the following in Haskell:

I’ve just submitted a paper, coauthored with Simon Peyton Jones, to the Haskell Symposium. In this paper, we outline what we think is an interesting point in the design space of intermediate languages for a lazy functional programming language like Haskell, and show some cool optimisations that we can do with it that are hard or impossible to express in the intermediate language used by GHC today.

I’ve often thought it would be a nice idea to mash together Eelco Dolstra’s ideas about purely-functional software deployment with functional reactive programming to produce a purely functional build system. In this world, compilers are pure functions from source (.c files) to object (.o files) and these dependencies are encoded explicitly by argument-passing in the program rather than happening implicitly via the file system.