This is my modest contribution to the F# Advent Calendar 2015. Thanks to @sergey_tihon for organizing it! Check out the epic stuff others have produced so far on his website or under the #fsAdvent hashtag on Twitter. Also, don’t miss the Japan Edition of #fsAdvent for more epicness… Sometime last year, in a moment of beer-fueled inspiration, I ended up putting together @fsibot, the ultimate mobile F# IDE for the nomad developer with a taste for functional-first programming. This was fun, some people creat[...]

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across the Wonderland Clojure Katas, by @gigasquid. It's a wonderful project, with 7 independent coding exercises, inspired by Lewis Carrol's "Alice in Wonderland". I love that type of stuff, and saw that @byronsamaripa had already made a Scala port, so I figured, why not port it to F#? As it happens, I had to travel to Seattle this week; this gave me enough idle airplane time to put together a first version here. I also had a chance to chat with  @tomaspetricek and @reed[...]

A couple of weeks ago, I came across this blog post by Steve Shogren, which looks at various programming languages, and attempts to define a “language safety score”, by taking into account a list of language criteria (Are nulls allowed? Can variables be mutated? And so on), aggregating them into an overall safety score – and finally looking for whether the resulting score was a reasonable predictor for the observed bug rate across various projects. I thought this was an interesting idea. However, I also h[...]

As much as we people who write code like to talk about code, the biggest challenge in a software project is not code. A project rarely fails because of technology – it usually fails because of miscommunications: the code that is delivered solves a problem (sometimes), but not the right one. One of the reasons we often deliver the wrong solution is that coding involves translating the world of the original problem into a different language. Translating one way is hard enough as it is, but then, rarely are u[...]

I got curious the other day about how to measure the F# community growth, and thought it could be interesting to take a look at this through StackOverflow. As it turns out, it’s not too hard to get some data, because StackExchange exposes a nice API, which allows you to make all sorts of queries and get a JSON response back. As a starting point, I figured I would just try to get the number of questions asked per month. The API allows you to retrieve questions on any site, by tag, between arbitrary dates. R[...]