Discoveries This Week 02/06/2009

RickM — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:24:00 GMT

Some interesting gems this week. Revit, Closures and MathTools won the day. However, I do hope you'll take a look at the IL post as well.

Blog – Jeremy Tammik’s Use F# Directly in Revit

In Jeremy’s post he discusses what is initially necessary to get F# and Revit working together. He also provides a sample of a Revit addin written in F#.

Revit is Autodesk’s architecture and design studio. It allows physical engineers to coordinate and play with, design and visualize data while integrating directly with AutoCad. It also provides a .NET 2.0 API. Given F#’s support for units as well as it’s concise and mathy style, it makes sense that it would be an ideal language for engineers.

Site - WikiBooks FSharp Programming

Before I stumbled upon this site, I had never head of of WikiBooks. That’s why I was incredibly surprised to find that it has the best online general F# reference around. It has extensive sections on functional, immutable and imperative programming with rich examples and references to the math behind the ideas presented. It’s a great site to have at hand for both those learning about the language and those experienced but still needing to occasionally look something small up.

StackOverflow - A practical example of a closure in F#

Learning how to program functionally is much more than just learning some new ideas and a new syntax. It comes along with a ton of new jargon, some of which can be quite foreign sounding. I find that it often turns out that the jargon actually represents a very simple idea and that becomes immediately obvious when discussed with a simple example.

Software – FSharp.MathTools

As you might have suspected by its name, MathTools is an extensive set of mathematics libraries for F#. It provides, among other things, statistical functions, fast fourier transforms, optimization algorithms, Matlab compatibility and extended mathematical notation. With a little development this combined with VSLab could provide a viable alternative to tools like Matlab while still allowing for collaboration with colleagues.

Article – Introduction to IL Assembly Language