A Programming Language (APL) was invented in the swinging 60s, first appearing in 1964. C#, an OOP language, first appeared in the year 2000, to coincide with Britney’s Oops!… I did it again world tour. Adding numbers APL C# 2 + 2 using System; class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(2 + 2); } }   Note: C# may get a REPL in Visual Studio when project Roslyn is finally released. Min/M[...]

Type Providers are a mature language feature of F# 3 that provide instant typed access, with code completion, to a wide variety of data sources, without requiring code generation. As a language feature, F# Type Providers are cross platform, meaning they can be accessed on Windows via .Net, or on Mac and Linux using the Mono runtime. If you’re interested in using Type Providers pop down to Skills Matter this Thursday for a Type Provider Treasure Hunt with Tomas Petricek, or Creating Type Providers Hands On[...]

Passionate about programming, interested in meeting other like minded individuals? A good place to start is a local meetup group. .Net Here’s my short list of active .Net/Mono related groups in the UK which feature some C#, F# or VB content (let me know if I’ve missed your group): Group Members London Unity Usergroup 1074 Windows Phone User Group 850+ (on mailing list) F#unctional Londoners 742 [...]

Foq is a mature open source .Net mocking library written in F#. It’s raison d'être is to enable F# as a unit testing language, for F#, C# or VB.Net code bases. Foq is part a rich set of testing tools available to F# developers. Use Foq when unit testing in combination with staple .Net testing frameworks like NUnit and xUnit through to F# specific fluent assertion libraries like FsUnit and Unquote. Combine Foq with AutoFixture to simplify test setup even further. Wow, Autofixture.AutoFoq + AutoFixture.xU[...]

NorDevCon is a one day agile and tech conference held annually in the historic English town of Norwich, also the setting for the recent British comedy Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa. Last Friday I took the short hop across the Fens to Norwich to talk about Data Science and Machine Learning with F#. First a talk on F# Type Providers entitled All your base types are belong to us (thanks to Ross McKinlay for the meme), and then after lunch a hands on Machine Learning workshop exploring `Titanic passengers using [...]