This blog post is a part of the awesome F# Advent Calendar (see the previous entry about writing algorithms in F# from Rick Minerich), so it inevitably needs a Christmassy theme. However, there is also going to be a serious theme for the blog post, which is domain-specific languages. One of my favorite examples of Domain-Specific Languages is a simple OpenGL library that I wrote some time ago for composing 3D graphics in F#. You can see it in my NDC 2014 talk Domain Specific Languages, the functional[...]

As Howard Mansell already announced on the BlueMountain Tech blog, we have officially released the "1.0" version of Deedle. In case you have not heard of Deedle yet, it is a .NET library for interactive data analysis and exploration. Deedle works great with both C# and F#. It provides two main data structures: series for working with data and time series and frame for working with collections of series (think CSV files, data tables etc.) The great thing about Deedle is that it has been becoming a founda[...]

If you are following me or the #fsharp hashtag on Twitter, you might have already come across a link to fsharpWorks or one of the upcoming F# events organized by fsharpWorks. So, what is fsharpWorks and what are we planning for you?

Most discussions about monads, even in F#, start by looking at the well-known standard monads for handling state from Haskell. The reader monad gives us a way to propagate some read-only state, the writer monad makes it possible to (imperatively) produce values such as logs and the state monad encapsulates state that can be read and changed. These are no doubt useful in Haskell, but I never found them as important for F#. The first reason is that F# supports state and mutation and often it is just ea[...]

As someone doing programming language research, I find it really interesting to think about how programming language research is done, how it has been done in the past and how it should be done. This kind of questions are usually asked by philosophy of science, but only a few people have discussed this in the context of computing (or even programming languages). So, my starting point was to look at the classic works in the general philosophy of science and see which of these could tell us something about[...]