Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : math, roundup, F#

F# Discoveries This Week 09/17/2010

RickM — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 20:25:06 GMT

ICFP approaches quickly and I’m working hard to make that those four hours of CUFP F# tutorial will be well worth your time. Meanwhile I’ve gathered the best the of the F# community for your enjoyment. Dig in!

News

September 23rd at CUFPx Michigan - Mark Harris: "A Commercial Deployment of F# "

“Mark Harris, formerly of Microsoft, currently working for Grange Insurance in Columbus, Ohio, will be presenting a case study of a commercial deployment of an F# solution. One of the highlights of this deployment--a process which took 18 hours was cut down to 6 minutes. Mark will be discussing the benefits and drawbacks of using F# in Grange's commercial app.

Audio and Video

Deep Fried Bytes Technology Podcast Episode 60: The Futures of the F# Language with Luke Hoban

“In this episode Keith and Woody sit down with F# Program Manager Luke Hoban at TechEd 2010 to discuss the futures of the F# language. Luke gave the guys the scoop on what developers can accomplish with F# and what the team has planned for upcoming releases of F# with Visual Studio.”

General

Dmitri Nesteruk 's Making DSLs in F#

“This article shows that making a DSL in F# is really simple. Of course, the thing about DSLs is they are domain-specific, so for the domain you choose you might encounter a lot more challenges. Have fun!”

Neil Carrier's Basic F# Computation Expressions Using Yield and Combine

“I decided to learn a little bit about computation expressions beyond the basic Bind/Return operations. So I made a goal of learning something about the Yield/Combine operations.”

Neil Carrier's F# Async Computation Expressions: A Tiny Model System

“Continuing my quest to learn computation expressions, I decided to explore from scratch the implementation of basic asynchronous behavior. This post is the result.”

Robert Pickering's What is object oriented programming really all about?

“People often ask me what functional programming is all about and why is it useful. In an attempt to answer this question in a way that is relevant to object oriented programmers it struck me it might be useful to look at what people find useful in modern object oriented programming.”

Celso Axelrud's Vector, Matrix and Linear Algebra in F#

“The following script snippets present the vector and matrix functionalities in Microsoft.Fsharp.Numerics namespace from Fsharp.PowerPack assemble.”

Daniel Markham's Functional TDD: Codd is my Copilot

“You work for the IRS. Your job today is to select a list of people with large bank balances so that you can do some kind of indescribably-complex tax-stuff to them. Your boss would like a list of these guys on his desk by noon.”

Vladimir Matveev's Slides And Samples

“Presentation and code samples from my recent talk on FSUG meeting.”

Stefano Ricciardi's Project Euler Problem 10 in F#

“Calculate the sum of all the primes below two million.”

Ashley Feniello's Project Euler Problem #8

“Largest products of five consecutive digits in this 1000-digit number.”

Ashley Feniello's Project Euler Problem #9

“Pythagorean triplet where a + b + c = 1000”

Ray Dacoco's TabControl in Visual F#

“TabControl is a control that can be used to organize information. It can be utilized as a good alternative to menustrip control.”

Ray Dacoco's Changing the Pointer when the mouse hovers an object

“To change the mouse pointer when the mouse hovers an object, use the Cursor property. All form controls in Visual F# has Cursor property.”

Community

StackOverflow - Does Functional Programming Replace GoF Design Patterns?

“Functional languages have plenty of best practice rules of the form "when you encounter problem X, use code that looks like Y", which is basically what a design pattern is.”

StackOverflow - F# Type declaration possible ala Haskell?

“If you want to keep readable type declarations separately from the implementation, you can use 'fsi' files (F# Signature File).”

A Look Outside

Chris Waggoner's Category Theory

“Category Theory is like Set Theory, but supposedly better. What is it, though?”

F# Discoveries This Week 12/29/2009

RickM — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:45:42 GMT

It’s been a bit of a light week with the holidays. Although, for the truly dedicated, that’s just a chance to get some quality time in with with a favorite programming language (or to write a poem about it).

Tomas Petricek uses Accelerator in a GPU Game of Life simulation

This article is the second one from a series about using Accelerator from F#. Today, we'll use Accelerator types directly from F# - this is the simplest possible approach and is very similar to the way you'd work with Accelerator in C#.

Robert Sundström explores GCD and LCM in F#

I have spent this evening composing some mathematical functions in F#. So far I have just made two for gcd and lcm and one that can identify prime numbers. I want like to share the code with you.

Robert Pickering describes his work on FunctionalNHibernate

In the future I’ll be looking at how to broadening what you can do with FunctionalNHibernate ClassMap descriptions and improve data access by integrating Linq like features.

Flying Frog solves Rosetta Code’s Data Munging 2 Example

Perhaps the most surprising result is that the F# solutions are extremely concise even when compared with bleeding-edge research languages such as Haskell.

Flying Frog plays with Generic Algorithms

The program begins with a random string of letters and spawns a generation of 200 random mutations of the parent string, selects the fittest mutation (by similarity to an "ideal" string) and uses that individual to spawn the next generation. The ideal string used is "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL".

Julien Ortin uses F# to clean up his temporary internet files

A quick and dirty F# script to clean temporary internet files (including Flash cookies which don’t get deleted by the browsers).

Steffen Forkmann observes asynchronous downloads with Rx and F#

This time I will demonstrate how we can use this API and asynchronous workflows to download a couple of websites asynchronous and in parallel.

The PFX Team tours the .NET 4 Parallel Programming Samples

On Code Gallery, we have a plethora of samples that highlight aspects of the .NET Framework 4 that help with writing scalable and efficient parallel applications. This post examines each of those samples, providing an overview of what each provides.

Satnam Singh writes a poem about F#

Distracted by Abstraction - A poem about F#

F# Discoveries This Week 10/11/2009

RickM — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 03:29:00 GMT

This week we find ourselves with a wide range of topics from the fundamental to the advanced. Do enjoy.

Matthew Podwysocki’s Post: Functional Programming Fundamentals Lectures

Earlier this year, I had the privilege to record a Channel 9 video session covering functional programming basics with Erik Meijer and Charles Torre. We covered some of the basics, but at some point you need to go back to the fundamentals in order to truly learn this paradigm. With that, Erik with the help of Charles, have kicked off the Channel 9 lecture series on Functional Programming Fundamentals.

Ade Miller’s Gotchas: Adding Attributes to Properties on Interfaces in F#

I ran into a couple of issues when writing an F# class to be consumed by C#. Specifically when it came to adding attributes to a property declared on an interface.

Steve Horsfield’s F#: Pipelined Monads – Solutions From the Community

The solutions from both Felix and Keith involved creating a single operator that wrapped bind. Felix did this directly and Keith did it by using the computation expression syntax in F#.

Agnius Vasiliauskas’s Evaluating math expressions in F#

We will try to write such universal eval function which accepts arbitrary math expression and returns result to the user. So what are possible ways of implementing such function in F# ?

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

It’s the responsibility of any serious programmer to know how how his or her tools work all the way down the chain. In this relatively short article (given the topic) everything you would need to write a .NET compiler is distilled. It’s the best reference of it’s kind I’ve seen.