To show just how significant parallelized algorithms can be, today I discovered pxz, a parallelized version of the xz compression utility, which I use constantly. The proof is in the numbers: [...]

Today I finally succeeded at getting a fully local version of Hoogle running on my machine, with filesystem links for all packages that I have installed, and remote links for those I don’t. Since this was definitely a non-trivial exercise, I wanted to capture the knowledge here for anyone else trying to do the same. First, let me mention that [...]

The fix combinator is a higher order function that can turn any function into a potentially recursive one. It can be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, since neither the definition nor the documentation is very clear on what you might use it for. However, I’ve found one handy use case: creating recursive lambdas. Say you have [...]

In an effort to better understand parsing in the Haskell world, I decided to port a hand-crafted parser I’d written for Subversion dump files in C++11 into a Haskell version. It’s not that the old parser didn’t work well, but I wanted to see what Haskell could make of the problem with its laziness and combinator-oriented parsing libraries. If you [...]

The Free Monad is something I’ve been having a great deal of difficulty wrapping my head around. It’s one of those Haskell concepts that ends up being far simpler than any of the articles on the Net would have you think. So, here’s a whirlwind tour of this Monad and how it can be super handy. First, imagine you’re building [...]

Yesterday’s artice on Monads in pictures has been translated into Japanese by Eugene Yokota. Many thanks to Eugene for such a rapid translation! [...]