fwaris

• E2E: Donna Malayeri, Gilad Bracha, Luke Hoban - Web Programming and More

  May 18, 2012 at 7:50 AM

  Scala has delimited contintuations (shift / reset keywords) where you can bracket some state that is relevant for your computation and do something with it (save/restore/ship to another location, etc). A stateful web framework could leverage that well, although I don't know of any that does.

  Also, one of the useful F# features  is metaprogramming using computation expressions that provides language extensibility (this is like C++ or LISP macros but not exactly). Donna talks about that at around the 45 minute mark. One of the products that leverages it well is WebSharper (http://websharper.com) for generating client side javascript from F# code.

• YOW! 2011: Tony Morris - Functional Programming and Functional Thinking

  Dec 31, 2011 at 6:11 PM

  At least one (ivy league) university has made the move to functional programming - Carnegie Mellon.

  http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/teaching-fp-to-freshmen/

  Their language of choice is Standard ML.

• Brian Beckman: Hidden Markov Models, Viterbi Algorithm, LINQ, Rx and Higgs Boson

  Dec 28, 2011 at 4:13 PM

  Here is an F# version  - just for kicks

  http://fsviterbi.codeplex.com

  See F# source here: http://fsviterbi.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/64363#1117175

  Test script: http://fsviterbi.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/64363#1117178

  Some differences:

  Actual code (excluding comments) is slighly shorter due to F#'s better type inference and buit-in tuple support.

  Path copying is avoided due to 'structural sharing' of F# collections (list in this case)

  The double loop calculation is parallelized using TPL wapper "PSeq"  but can be easily serialized. This could be useful for very large state sets on multi-core machines.

• Simon Peyton-Jones and John Hughes - It's Raining Haskell

  Dec 26, 2011 at 4:46 PM

  thanks charles for all the super videos ... keep it going!

• Tao Liu: F# Design Patterns

  Oct 21, 2011 at 5:30 PM

  Recently did a poc with F# and Solver Foundation for an optimization model for part purchasing.

  The model's input data comes in multiple Excel files.

  F# came in really handy for the complex data manipulation that was required to take the source data and feed it to the solver foundation model.

  Data manipulation is one of the areas where functional languages do exceptionally well. Such processing would have been untenable with Java (and even C# despite LINQ).

  Suffice is to say that the PoC is very well received and has already saved the company mega bucks.

• F# 3.0: data, services, Web, cloud, at your fingertips

  Sep 17, 2011 at 7:50 PM

  Very nice.

  I could use the 'show' and 'freebase' samples for some internal demos coming up next month.

  Will these be posted anywhere?

• C9 Lectures: Greg Meredith - Monadic Design Patterns for the Web 4 of n

  Aug 02, 2011 at 8:40 AM

  @AceHack:

  F# has a DSL for monads called Computation Expressions so monads 'look' different in F#. Also, I think that once you have a monad implementation, the DSL makes it easier to use the implementation in your code.

  So F# provides some extra language support for monads.

  However, unlike Scala, F# does not have higher-kinded types so you cannot compose two monad implementations together (as easily).

  I struggled with monads at first but then I realized that monads are really about function composition. Here is blog post that emphasizes this aspect of monads that may help with the understanding:

  http://fwaris.wordpress.com/2011/07/30/understanding-monads/

• Anders Hejlsberg: Questions and Answers

  May 04, 2011 at 4:00 AM

  Nice interview! Looks like C# is turning out to be a great language.

  For now though, I am enjoying the succinctness of F# without losing anything. I have to admit learing F# was harder than I thought as I did not have a funcitonal programming background.

  My question is more appropriate for the CLR team but I will ask anyway. It seems that OO-based platform (such as CLR and JVM) are not super optimized for symbolic computing (I learned while reading "F# for Scientists" by John Harrop). Are there any plans for supporting symbolic computing more efficiently? To be honest I don't even know what that even means in terms of CLR changes. I suspect it has to do with creation and garbage collection of extra objects that perhaps can be avoided if the CLR is further optimized for functional languages.

  Considering that both CLR and JVM have added special support for dynamic languages (so that dynamic method dispatch is optimized) can something similar be done for F# and other functional languages (Scala and Clojure)?

• C9 Lectures: Yuri Gurevich - Introduction to Algorithms and Computational Complexity, 2 of n

  Feb 16, 2011 at 7:11 PM

  Interesting classification of algorithms into linear, parallel, etc.

  I suppose in future we will have to contend with quantum algorithms (as in quantum computing).

  Here is an interesting talk on a quantum algorithm that is supposedly faster than its classical equivalent.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKA1k3VJDq8

• C9 Lectures: Greg Meredith - Monadic Design Patterns for the Web 3 of n

  Jan 10, 2011 at 4:44 PM

  Wonderful series!! I can see now where Greg is headed. He has yet to deliver the punch line so I am waiting in anticipation.

  Two comments:

  a) I think it would help to have a touch screen or something so that when the presenter 'points' to the screen, the pointer can be recorded in the screen capture as well.

  b) Greg looks like he has been working way too hard. My suggestion is the have him in check into the nearest day spa for a full day of pamering. Go ahead Greg you have our permission.

   

   

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