Back in November last year, my eldest son and I popped over to the Insomnia Gaming Festival in Telford to take part in a game jam organised by Global GameCraft. (Today I  bumped into the source again on a USB stick). The theme for the day was “The Last Assignment”. We decided to go with a text based adventure game loosely based on the Dirty Harry movie. With just 7 hours on the clock we managed to put together quite a fun adventure game with ambient sound and graphics: and picked up the prize for bes[...]

How hard is it to get started in functional programming? Let’s have a look at how quickly you can get started on a selection of simple expression-oriented programming languages. Today let’s try Clojure, Elm, F#, Haskell and OCaml. Online REPL No install required just point your browser at a URL and you’re off: Language Online REPL Clojure http://tryclj.com/ F# http://www.tryfsharp.org/ Elm http://elm-lang.org/tr[...]

Are you working in the enterprise? Do you find yourself, day-in-day-out, up to the eyeballs in unmaintainable code? Does the once beautiful architecture now more closely resemble a big ball of mud, that no amount of tooling will dig you out of? What can you do? 1) Bury your head in the sand A very popular option, you just need to keep practising denial. 2) Turn to drink Another popular option, although unfortunately this strategy is only likely to last as long as your liver. 3) Become a scrum[...]

In a recent thread on CodePlex Mads Torgeson, C# Language PM at Microsoft, announced 2 of the key features planned for C# 6 release have now been cut: Primary constructors Declaration expressions According to Mads: They are both characterized by having large amounts of downstream work still remaining. primary constructors could grow up to become a full-blown record feature Reading between the lines Mads seems to be saying the features weren’t finished and even if they were they seemed t[...]

With Sergey Tihon on vacation this week, I’ve collated a one off alternative F# Weekly roundup, covering some of the highlights from another busy week in the F# community. News in brief NYC based stealth F# start up Jet.com raised $25 million! MBrace framework is one of the 20 finalists selected by Founders Game How a startup in the real-estate industry uses F# type providers to greatly simplify data access The F# Logo project has reached colour selection: Events This week has seen m[...]