There are a lot of interesting programming languages out there, but downloading and setting up the environment can be very time consuming when you just want to try one out. The good news is that you can try out many languages in your browser straight away, often with tutorials which guide you through the basics. Following the pattern of 7 languages in 7 weeks book, here’s a somewhat abridged version. Dynamic Languages Fed up of long compile times, want a lightweight environment for scripting? Dynamic [...]

Last night I gave a talk at the F#unctional Londoners meetup about my experiences working in a team building a game in a day at the recent London GameCraft game jam event. We went with a continuous runner and used XNA to build the game on Windows with a hack to get it working on Visual Studio 2012, then Neil Danson was able to port it to iOS and Android using MonoGame. I brought along an Apple iPad and Google Nexus 7 both happily running the game. Building a game in a day from ptrelford iOS and An[...]

Android games are now out-selling games for Sony and Nintendo handhelds. Thanks to the nice people at Xamarin you can now develop Android and iOS apps using all your favourite .Net languages: Now it has been possible to target F# on Android and iOS for some time. In the latest release FSharp.Core is included and a blessed dll for the 64kb limit on trial versions. Windows You can use Xamarin.Android inside Visual Studio 2012 on Windows, which is how I got started. But I’d recommend giving Xamarin Stud[...]

While working on another game idea I bumped into a collision detection sample using the Processing language where you can draw walls for a ball to bounce off. It reminded me of SoundDrop on iOS. Here’s my own mashup using the collision detection code, Tomas Petricek’s reactive rectangles sample for the lines and a generated tremolo sound effect. Along the way I found a “Chrome Experiment” version in JavaScript called BallsDropping and a very cute mult[...]

I’ve had the pleasure of working with and interviewing C# developers for over a decade now. However here’s 5 common misconceptions I continue to encounter. 1) Lists are implemented as linked lists List<T> is actually implemented using an underlying array. The name is a little misleading with the earlier non-generic version having the less ambiguous name of ArrayList and in F# they are aliased to ResizeArray to avoid confusion. Needless to say the performance characteristics of operations on an array are [...]