2014 has been another crazy year for the F#unctional Londoners meetup with over 20 sessions already. Thanks to our hosts Skills Matter we’ve been able to hold a meetup roughly once every 2 weeks. Here’s a run down of the year so far and what’s coming up. January SQL Type Provider Deep Dive with Ross McKinlay (video) Ross kicked off the year with a deep dive to his LINQ enabled erasing SQL Type Provider. Following on, in May, Ross left the sunny shores of Southend to tour the east coast with the t[...]

FsiBot is a cloud hosted bot that evaluates F# expressions in mentions, built by Mathias Brandewinder. Underneath it uses the Twitter API, F# Compiler Services all hosted on Azure. In the beginning the F# community put a lot of effort into bringing it down testing it’s security. Nowadays it’s become more of a creative outlet for code golf enthusiasts showcasing all sorts from ASCII Art to math. Christmas Tree Tomas’s tree first appeared before @fsibot was cool or for that matter even existed: @toma[...]

This Saturday saw the Developer Developer Developer! (DDD) East Anglia conference in Cambridge. DDD events are organized by the community for the community with the agenda for the day set through voting. T-Shirts The event marked a bit of a personal milestone for me, finally completing a set of DDD regional speaker T-Shirts, with a nice distinctive green for my local region. Way back in 2010 I chanced a first appearance at a DDD event with a short grok talk on BDD in the lunch break at DDD Reading. Since[...]

Earlier this year I had a play with Microsoft’s new compile to JavaScript language, TypeScript. Every man and his dog has a compile to JavaScript solution these days. TypeScript’s angle appears to be to provide optional static typing over JavaScript and some ES6 functionality while compiling out to ES3 by default. It provides a class based syntax similar to C#’s and seems to be aimed at developer’s attempting to scale out JavaScript based solutons. Last year I ported Elm’s Mario sample to F#, which ended [...]

Back at the start of the year, I took the F# parser combinator library FParsec out for a spin, writing an extended Small Basic compiler and later a similar parser for a subset of C#. Previously I’d been using hand rolled parsers, for projects like TickSpec, a .Net BDD library, and Cellz, an open source spreadsheet. With FParsec you can construct a parser relatively rapidly and easily using the powerful built-in functions and F# interactive for quick feedback. FParsec has been used in a number of interesti[...]