I spent Saturday at the TEDxCam Hackathon. This was an event which got together more than 40 coders to work in teams on a project in the area of data visualisation to compete for gadgets and tickets to the main conference.

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.