HTML input elements have a placeholder attribute which you can use to show a bit of text to prompt the end user. Although you can make an editable div by using the contenteditable attribute, it will not support the placeholder attribute. I needed to do both, so I ended up reinventing the placeholder attribute for [...]

Phil Trelford recently released Foq, a small F# mocking library (with a very daring name). If most of your code is in F#, this is probably not a big deal for you, because the technique of mocking isn’t very useful in F# (at least in my experience). On the other hand, if your goal is to unit test some C# code in F#, then Foq comes in very handy. So why would you want to write your unit tests in F# in the first place? Let’s start with some plain old C# code, like this:namespace CodeBase { using System; [...]

So this tweet got a lot of attention: potch @potch alias yolo=’git commit -am "DEAL WITH IT" && git push -f origin master’ I laughed at this, not because it implies some kind of reckless disregard for process and community, but because, in 1999,  at a former employer, when our VCS was Microsoft SourceSafe, this was just the way [...]

I am still toying with the idea of using FSI from within Excel – wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of having to resort to VBA or C# via VSTO, I could leverage F#, with unfettered access to .NET and a nice scripting language, while having at my disposal things like the charting abilities of Excel? Judging from the discussion on Twitter this morning, it seems I am not the only one to like the idea of F# in Excel: @jonharrop @dnesteruk @7sharp9 @dsyme the F# plugin for MonoDevelop & tryfsharp.org can provide a[...]

This post continues my journey converting the Python samples from Machine Learning in Action into F#. On the program today: chapter 7, dedicated to AdaBoost. This is also the last chapter revolving around classification. After almost 6 months spending my week-ends on classifiers, I am rather glad to change gears a bit! The idea behind the algorithm Algorithm outline AdaBoost is short for “Adaptative Boosting”. Boosting is based on a very common-sense idea: instead of trying to find one perfect classifier t[...]