F# Discoveries This Week 09/03/2010

RickM — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 22:12:19 GMT

One of the greatest things about running this blog, other than having a structured way to read all of the F# community content, is that I’ve been able to watch the community grow in a very concrete way. Looking back to a year ago there was only six posts on F# over the course of a week, now we have well over twenty. It’s truly amazing to see.

Now, on to the links.

Audio and Video

Dr. Ralf Lämmel's C9 Lectures: Advanced Functional Programming - Type Classes

“In this second lecture in the series, Ralf digs into Type Classes, which are type system constructs that were originally introduced to provide a form of ad hoc polymorphism (i.e., an advanced form of overloading).”

Rick Minerich's Functional Language Paradigms with F#

“I've got great news. F# is here and is poised to increase your productivity and reduce your suffering.”

Peter Sestoft's Teaching programming language concepts with F#

“Peter introduces the curriculum, lecture plan and lecture notes for the course "Programs as data" that uses the functional programming concepts in F# to teach students language concepts and implementation details.”

Tools

Essential F# | Refcardz

“This DZone Refcard will lead you through the basic essentials so that you can quickly move on to using this Functional Programming Language for creating some mind-bending code.”

fsxplat - Released: FSharp packages 1.2

“F# packages and samples for use across platforms”

Phillip Trelford's TickSpec: An F# BDD Framework

“Right now TickSpec is intended as a lightweight framework to get you started with BDD using F#. It is standards based, supporting a subset of the Gherkin language, so should be easy to change to another Gherkin based framework like Cucumber, SpecFlow or StorEvil.”

General

Vladimir Matveev's F#: Building compiler from sources.

“Of course, compiling them sources and observing all internal compiler activities, so to say “in action’.”

Ashley Feniello's Fixing Decades-old Bugs in the HP-35

“To make an assembler, I just parse with a series of regular expressions. F#’s active patterns came in super handy for this! In fact, the assembler turned out to be fewer lines of code than the disassembler.”

Ashley Feniello's Microcode-level HP-35 Emulator (in JavaScript!)

“I had the (silly) idea of building a JavaScript-based emulator. Looking at Peter Monta’s Python-based disassembler and his object code listing, it looked simple enough to automatically generate script from David Cochran’s original bits. I wrote my own little straight forward 100-line disassembler in F#, producting an array of JavaScript functions”

Brian McNamara's F# for puzzles (Morse code decoder)

“The idea is simple; the computer works out all the possibilities for the next 3 letters, and then the human selects which prefixes “look promising” to investigate further.”

Neil Carrier's TechNeilogy: Fuzzy Logic F# Reference Module: Fuzzy0

“Below is the fuzzy logic reference code for module Fuzzy0. Tomorrow I’ll post an example of its use that explores some extensions of earlier techniques.”

Yin Zhu's F# and Data Mining: WekaSharp: Tutorial for using Weka in F#/.Net

“The minimal wrapper in F# for Weka.”

Daniel Markham's Structuring Larger F# Functional Projects

“So here's a suggested structure outline for those larger functional projects”

Ade Miller's F# Samples for Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET

“We’ve been working with the F# Team to get the samples for Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET ported to F#.”

Neil Carrier's TechNeilogy: F#, Fuzzy Logic, WPF, and Tomatoes!

“This is my 100th blog post, and to celebrate, I’m pulling out all the stops. This example will combine F#, fuzzy logic, WPF, and tomatoes!”

Neil Carrier's TechNeilogy: Conjunctive Fuzzy Logic Rules in F#

“It shows how to make multipart conjunctive rules by storing the input sets in a list and using the “min” operator to combine the results into a truncation height. To do this, it adds vector versions of the fire and fire all functions.”

Justin Angel's Windows Phone 7 supports VB.Net and F#

“In this article we’ll review Windows Phone 7 support for the Visual Basic .Net and F# programming languages. Our goal is to demonstrate that Windows Phone 7 can indeed support F# and VisualBasic.Net code libraries and user controls.”

F# Artificial Intelligence Library Tutorial

“This step-by-step tutorial describes how to use the library in fsx script and C# project.”

Chris Marinos's 5 Reasons to use F# Interactive in Visual Studio 2010

“I find that I use F# Interactive more for performance analysis, learning F#, and verifying Base Class Library behavior than for spiking or scripting.”

Community

Stack Overflow - Calling F# (.Net dll) code from php

“Yes you can, by using PHP COM class but it works only on Windows version of PHP5+ and needs no separate installation.”

Stack Overflow - Scrap Your Boilerplate in f#

“I've used the Scrap Your Boilerplate and Uniplate libraries in the Haskell programming language, and I would find that form of generic programming over discriminated unions to be really useful. Is there an equivalent library in the f# programming language?”

Stack Overflow - Path to Become a Better F# Programmer

“What should be my steps from now on to become a better/professional F# programmer?”

Teaching and Basics

Bill Morrissey's Learning F# for C# developers: Scope, Workflow and Lists

“This post is part two of a series of posts looking at syntactical examples of F# and C#. This post will supply you with easy to understand F# coding examples.”

Anders Hesselbom's Type inference in F#

“I have recently been to a short F# presentation at HiQ in Arboga. One of the things that got mentioned was type inference.”

Rey Dacoco's WebBrowser control (Visual F# Windows Forms Application)