A couple of days ago, I got into the following Twitter exchange: @brandewinder do you have any link to get in touch with this combo? #fsharp— Max Malook (@max_malook) March 21, 2014   So why do I think FsCheck + XUnit = The Bomb? I have a long history with Test-Driven Development; to this day, I consider Kent Beck’s “Test-Driven Development by Example” one of the biggest influences in the way I write code (any terrible code I might have written is, of course, to be blamed entirely on me, and not on the[...]

During some recent meanderings through the confines of the internet, I ended up discovering the Winnow Algorithm. The simplicity of the approach intrigued me, so I thought it would be interesting to try and implement it in F# and see how well it worked. The purpose of the algorithm is to train a binary classifier, based on binary features. In other words, the goal is to predict one of two states, using a collection of features which are all binary. The prediction model assigns weights to each feature; to [...]

My favorite column in MSDN Magazine is Test Run; it was originally focused on testing, but the author, James McCaffrey, has been focusing lately on topics revolving around numeric optimization and machine learning, presenting a variety of methods and approaches. I quite enjoy his work, with one minor gripe –his examples are all coded in C#, which in my opinion is really too bad, because the algorithms would gain much clarity if written in F# instead. Back in June 2013, he published a piece on Amoeba Metho[...]

tl/dr: Community for F# has a brand-new page at www.c4fsharp.net – with links to a ton of recorded F# presentations, as well as F# hands-on Dojos and material. Check it out, and let us know on Twitter what you think, and what you want us to do next… and spread the word! If you are into F# and don’t know Community for F#, you are missing out! Community for F#, aka C4FSharp, is the brainchild of Ryan Riley. Ryan has been running C4FSharp tirelessly for years, making great content available online for the F#[...]

A couple of months ago, I started working on an F# decision tree & random forest library, and pushed a first draft out in July 2013. It was a very minimal implementation, but it was a start, and my plan was to keep refining and add features. And then life happened: I got really busy, I began a very poorly disciplined refactoring effort on the code base, I second and third guessed my design - and got nothing to show for a while. Finally in December, I took some time off in Europe, disappeared in the French [...]