I often think of why I feel that it’s important to have a functional language—not just write code that’s pseudo-functional in an imperative language.  As I think this through, I wanted to record some of my ideas on the subject. Even the best developers I’ve known are almost always inclined to take the defaults.  I [...]

At a few points in my career I’ve worked in tech support.  It’s an experience I heartily recommend to every developer.  Every developer should spend at least a month or two supporting software because it helps you to understand the sorts of issues our tech support people deal with.  I really believe that too many [...]

Jon Harrop, who is a strong advocate for functional programming, recently tweeted some links to questions on programmers.stackexchange.com (here and here) I’m generalizing a bit (not much though) but the basic substance of these questions amounted to “Why Should I Learn Functional Programming?”   It’s a fair question.  I’ve been a developer and around developers long [...]

So recently some of us were discussing the fact that F# 3.0 is going to add a feature to make it more amenable to OO programmers.  F# 3.0 will add automatic “getters” and “setters” for members of a class. A small digression; I prefer the terms “inspector” and “mutator” because they seem more precise. If [...]

I like working with the Sublime Text 2 editor and I surely like to work with FSharp so I’ve been trying to find ways to make life easier for myself.  A few tips to pass along: Get the F# Textmate Bundle. Once you get it, unzip it into the ~\Application Data\Sublime Text 2\Packages directory.  In [...]