F# Discoveries This Week 07/16/2010

RickM — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:49:19 GMT

As promised, a fresh batch of links to sooth your aching desire for more F#. I’m particularly excited to announce I’ll give giving a F# tutorial this year at the Commercial Users of Functional Programming conference. CUFP is going to have a lot of great content this year and will be well worth attending for anyone interested in functional programming.

News

FAKE – F# Make 1.40.5.0 Released

F# Jobs at Credit Suisse, London

I’ll be giving a F# tutorial at CUFP

Video

Steffen Forkmann speaks on F# Open Source Tools at the New England F# User Group

Presented at the New England F# User Group on June 7, 2010, Steffen discusses FAKE and NaturalSpec. Steffen is the author of the two open source F# projects "FAKE - F# Make" and "NaturalSpec".

Articles

Alex Pedenko’s Introducing Furious – A proof-of-concept RRM for F#

Meet furious. Furious is a RRM - a Record Relation Mapping system. It is a database-independent object query dsl for records, that currently has a (barebones) mysql implementation. Here's how it works. Suppose you have a record graph like so…

Vagif Abilov’s Exploring Amazon S3 with F#

The purpose of this article is to show how fast you can dig into low level details of an unknown technology using F#, and how little code you need to write. Therefore I keep the text of the article short, focusing just on the required steps.

Yin Zhu’s F# Async workflow application: a Flickr crawler

My strategy is to use the search query to search images with some specific tags and from the result page(as shown below), the url of each image is extracted, from which the image and its tags are then crawled.

Daniel Markham’s F# Versus Microsoft's Regex. A Lesson in Types

I was doing some text processing. As part of that, I set up a few RegExes. As I continued coding, I realized that I was following a pattern: apply the regex, check the match count, and if there were a bunch of matches, either get the first or last item.

Jon Harrop’s F# vs Mathematica: an even faster pricer for American options

This new optimized and parallelized F# solution is now a whopping 960× faster than the original Mathematica code from Sal Mangano's Mathematica Cookbook.

Neil Carrier’s Pure OOP – A Personal Retrospective

Almost instantly, my thoughts about the problem undergo a phase change, and I re-write my earlier code to be more succinct, maintainable, and composable, and usually more computationally efficient.

Neil Carrier’s Integer Square Roots

This is an old algorithm, once popular in assembly language programs on small processors. The fact that it uses only integers, addition, subtraction, and less-than branching, mean that its hardware and software requirements are at rock bottom.

Julien Ortin’s F# Event module extension

Functions to extend the F# Event module.

Julien Ortin’s Socket helpers in F#

This post describes a module to perform common socket operations using asynchronous operations and reactive programming.

Julien Ortin’s European Central Bank – extracting reference rates with F#

Every day, the European Central Bank publishes “official” reference FX (foreign exchange) rates where currencies are quoted against the Euro (expressed as EUR/XXX), or 1 EUR = xxx XXX. The exchange rates of the last thirty sessions are available in xml format which we shall try to parse. In order to do so, we use F# and active patterns, based on Don Syme’s draft paper.

Petr Lepilov’s F# interactive, AppFabric cache and PowerShell Part 1 and Part 2

Applications can store any serializable CLR object without worrying about where the object gets stored. Scalability can be achieved by simply adding more computers on demand. The cache also allows for copies of data to be stored across the cluster, thus protecting data against failures. It runs as a service accessed over the network.

Steve Gilham’s dotcover 1.0 beta – first impressions

Not having R# at home -- because I rarely use C# even if I'm writing for .net -- it's this which interested me more. So, I gave it a try on my current F# project

Kurt Schelfthout’s F# and Code Contracts: not quite there yet

In this post I’ll show how you can get Code Contracts sort of working for F#. From my very initial explorations, I would conclude that they seem basically usable for F# programming – but you’ll need some glue and tape, and not everything works as you’d expect.

Edmon Begoli’s Scala vs. F#, Application Programming Features Round 1 and Round 2

F# and Scala, two relatively recent programming languages, provide most .NET and Java software developers with new functional programming features that are worth understanding and evaluating.

Ivan Towlson’s F# pattern matching for beginners, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3