Cast:

Brian Beckman, Physicist, Microsoft Veteran, Mathematica Hacker, LINQ, Xbox, Rx Developer, wrote foundational software for new starts in Bing Mobile Mapping and Technology platform. Created pure-functional language and runtime using combined numeric and symbolic processing for business intelligence and visualization. Co-Found Tesla and Volta efforts with Erik Meijer via LINQ and the Reactive Framework.  Approximately 85 patent filings and 25 issued patents. Consultant for Tire Physics on XBox racing game "Forza". * Designed and coded all physics for secret video-game project based on my "Physics of Racing" papers.

Michael Ficarra, a CoffeeScript/ECMAScript Enthusiast Developer at Groupon, can be described as having a passion for defining transformations of all sorts, so he is naturally very comfortable around compilers and functional programming languages. He is best known for his significant contributions to the CoffeeScript programming language, its original compiler, and his KickStarter-funded rewrite. As one of Github's most active users, he is an influential member of the online OSS and ECMAScript communities.

Tune in. Enjoy. Learn.

Erikand Brian explain what a database really is... Erik drinks hard drive acid, takes a hammer to a mouse in search of the database it hides (Brian's brawn is also employed in this endeavor), and Brian paints category theoretic expressions on the whiteboard. This isn't what you think it is, Alice. It's much, much more.

Enjoy. You don't want to miss this one.

Today marks the end of a drought and the beginning of more regular appearances by the dynamic duo. The band is back together!

Introducing a new Channel 9 series - Beckman Meijer Overdrive.

One of the truly great things about Brian Beckman and Erik Meijer is their natural ability to explain complex subject matter in ways normal people can readily understand, all while engaging and entertaining us. In this new series, Brian and Erik will get together each month to make music in the form of conversational (and improvisational, of course) jazz. Tune in and learn something new from two programming legends and true iconoclasts. It's guaranteed to put your mind into overdrive.

Here, Brian and Erik recap LINQ and dig into the notion that LINQ is composability. What does that mean, exactly? Where does Rx fit into this? What about the cloud? What's so special about LINQ? As you'd expect, other topics emerge naturally from this conversation as Brian and Erik make their case for a LINQ-ruled world.

We're excited and honored to have Brian and Erik back on C9—and excited, too, that this will be a recurring treat. Thank you, Brian and Erik!

Tune in. Enjoy. Learn.

It's been WAY too long since we've had Brian Beckman sharing knowledge, insights and perspectives on Channel 9. This changes now!

Needless to say, I was incredibly happy to spend an hour with Brian learning all about what he's up to these days. Not surprisingly, he's writing code and employing Rx and monads to solve very interesting problems. In this conversation (a code lesson, algorithm survey, a splash of random topical diversion), Brian explains and demonstrates his latest endeavor: implementing the Viterbi algorithm in C#. What's the Viterbi algorithm, Brian? What are hidden Markov models? What are you using this stuff for? Where does Rx fit into this? What's going on? By the way, it's awesome to learn that a Niner has been sharing C# monadic implementations with Brian (state monad, maybe monad).

Of course, no conversation with Brian - a physicist by training and a software architect at Microsoft - is complete without talking about some current physics problem: Finding the elusive Higgs Boson is all the rage these days, so we talk about what it means.

Brian also shares insights on Haskell, functional and hybrid programming languages (C# is imperative, but it provides functional capabilities like LINQ, for example, upon which Rx is built (Rx is LINQ-to-Streams or observable sequences of events, really)...). We also finally discuss his previous work at MS that we never got a chance to talk to him about while he was doing it. Before joining the Bing Mobile team, Brian was working on a project to create a new functional programming language. What was it?

Thank you, Brian!

Happy holidays from Channel 9 wherever you are and whatever, if anything, you're celebrating!


Notes and More:

The code Brian demos (download it, unzip it, launch VS, open the solution, then watch this video and play along): https://github.com/rebcabin/DotNetExtensionsImproved

From Wikipedia - information on Markov and Viterbi:

A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process with unobserved (hidden) states

The Viterbi algorithm is a dynamic programming algorithm for finding the most likely sequence of hidden states – called the Viterbi path – that results in a sequence of observed events, especially in the context of Markov information sources, and more generally, hidden Markov models.

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Exercise 2: go from labeling a tree to doing a constrained
container computation, as in WPF. Give everything a
bounding box, and size subtrees to fit inside their
parents, recursively.

Exercise 3: promote @return and @bind into an abstract
class "M" and make "SM" a subclass of that.

Exercise 4 (HARD): go from binary tree to n-ary tree.

Exercise 5: Abstract from n-ary tree to IEnumerable; do
everything in LINQ! (Hint: SelectMany).

Exercise 6: Go look up monadic parser combinators and
implement an elegant parser library on top of your new
state monad in LINQ.

Exercise 7: Verify the Monad laws, either abstractly
(pencil and paper), or mechnically, via a program, for the
state monad.

Exercise 8: Design an interface for the operators @return
and @bind and rewrite the state monad so that it implements
this interface. See if you can enforce the monad laws
(associativity of @bind, left identity of @return, right
identity of @return) in the interface implementation.

Exercise 9: Look up the List Monad and implement it so that it implements the same interface.

Exercise 10: deconstruct this entire example by using
destructive updates (assignment) in a discipline way that
treats the entire CLR and heap memory as an "ambient
monad." Identify the @return and @bind operators in this
monad, implement them explicitly both as virtual methods
and as interface methods.