Earlier in the year I came across a Stanford coding assignment inspired by Andrej Bauer’s Random Art. Pictures are built using randomly chosen mathematical expressions that take an x and y value and return a colour. The implementation on Andrej’s site uses OCaml, but is closed source, however a clear Python example is given. F# version The Python version worked out-of-the-box but took a while to render (10s of seconds) so I rewrote it in F# (a language based on OCaml) to improve generation time (to less t[...]

Go is a programming language developed at Google, loosely based on C, adding garbage collection and built-in concurrency primitives (goroutines). I’ve looked at Go briefly in the past, at a Strangeloop workshop in 2012 and later reading An Introduction to Programming in Go, but until now not really done anything with it. Recently I’ve been hearing some positive things about Go, so I thought I’d give it a go this evening on a simple task: downloading and unzipping a Nuget package. Some language highlights:[...]

FunSharp is a new cross-platform open source graphics library, based on Small Basic’s library, with a typed API crafted for the sharp languages, F# and C#. Drawing graphics is quick and easy:GraphicsWindow.FillEllipse(10,10,300,300) And when you ask FunSharp to draw graphics it will just go and open a window to view it for you: FunSharp provides similar functionality to Python’s PyGame, used for developing games, and Processing used for visual art. You can call FunSharp immediately from the F# REPL or bui[...]

Over the years the number of developer conferences seems to have multiplied so much so that there seems to be one on every day of the week. But many of the big name developer conferences charge north of 1000GBP/EUR/USD to attend their spectacles. So why would you attend a developer conference and can it be done on a shoestring? Why attend? Recently Ryan Riley asked that very question on Twitter: Question: why do so many developers go to conferences? To learn? To network? For notoriety? Has it worked?— Rya[...]

This week I ran a half-day hands on games development session at the Progressive .Net Tutorials hosted by Skills Matter in London. I believe this was the last conference to be held in Goswell Road before the big move to an exciting new venue. My session was on mobile games development with F# as the implementation language: Ready, steady, cross platform games - ProgNet 2015 from Phillip Trelford Here’s a quick peek inside the room: Game programming with @ptrelford @ #prognet2015 I'ma make and sell a [...]