In the previous post I explained, at a very high level, that monads are really about function composition with side activities. In this post, I will use an example based on F#’s Async monad to demonstrate practical uses of monads. … Continue reading →

As a late comer to functional programming (FP), I struggled a fair bit with understanding monads at first. The ‘aha’ moment for me was that monads are really about function composition. Function composition is somewhat of an alien concept for … Continue reading →

Recently, Robert Hundt of Google published a paper titled “Loop Recognition in C++/Java/Go/Scala” The paper compares various aspects (run-time performance, code size, etc.)  of the implementation of the same algorithm in different languages. See the paper for a detailed analysis. The … Continue reading →

National Highway Traffic Safety association (NHTSA) (http://nhtsa.gov) has loads of publicly available data on auto complaints and recalls (although you have to dig a bit to find the actual data files). Say you want to analyze National Highway Traffic Safety Administration customer complaints … Continue reading →

Here is a simple Sudoku solver that uses F# and Microsoft Solver Foundation’s Constraint Programming solver. The 9×9 matrix of a Sudoku puzzle is represented as a list of 81 cells. Cells can have values 0-9. Zeros represent blank cells. … Continue reading →