Over this past week at PDC I was lucky enough to see some fantastic sessions and spend time with members of the F# and greater Visual Studio language teams.  Naturally, these experiences have left me both floored and swimming in new ideas.  This edition of Discoveries This Week includes both the very best of what I saw at PDC 2009 and ...

Michael Feathers, author of the excellent book Working Effectively with Legacy Code, recently tweeted about a paper written by Peter Van Roy entitled Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know.   I thoroughly enjoyed the paper, despite being initially put off by its title.  It’s written in very accessible ...

Recently, I was reading David R. Tribble’s annotated version of Dijkstra’s famous letter “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”.  While in the process of reading, it occurred to me that I did not really understand the history of language abstraction.  To remedy this I’ve done some research and put together the following post.  I hope ...

In the image processing world, like most computational problems, we often think our work is composed of only two basic ideas: representation and transformation.  Of course, one may have many layers of both representations of transformations and transformations of representations which can make things appear quite complex at times. ...

This post is in response to Joe Armstrong’s Why OO Sucks.  While I feel that Joe’s post reads more like an sermon than a stream of rational thought, it does bring up a number of misconceptions I feel many people in the functional programming world share and which need to be discussed openly if it and the object oriented world are to come to ...

This is the first in a series of posts on the topic of interaction between different .NET languages.  I will cover all of the major Microsoft languages: C#, Visual Basic, F# and C++/CLI. In this first post in the series I will build a four language project in Visual Studio 2008 and begin to explore inter-language inheritance.  One of ...

In this post I compare and contrast Haskell and F#.  It may come as no surprise that with so much shared history they share so much in common.  However, it’s interesting to consider how the perspectives of the languages’ developers play a large role in determining the differences between the languages.   A Shared History As far ...

This week’s theme is functional programming.  Included are discussions on Software Transactional Memory, Functional Architecture and the impact of the CLR on functional Programming in .NET.   Blog: Brandon Werner’s Software Transactional Memory: Debunked! In starting with a title that is decidedly sensationalistic, Brandon effectively ...

It’s been a very exciting week.  I actually had more things to post than time would allow me to write about.  I’ll have to save them for next time.   Blog: Daniel Spiewak’s What is Hindley-Milner? (and why is it cool?) Hindley-Milner is the algorithm all these fancy programming languages like F# and Haskell for type ...

I’ve decided to post a roundup for the week of what I feel were some of the most important blog posts and application releases I happened upon.  Who knows, if it goes well maybe I’ll even make it a habit.  In this edition: Windows Live Writer Release Candidate, Executor, IronPython 2.0, Saving DotNetKicks and The Real World Haskell Book ...