Tag: F#
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Functional Programming is Dead, Long Live Expression-Oriented Programming
It’s funny how over time the meaning of a technical word will converge to something halfway between what the experts intended and some fuzzy notion consisting of the most easily graspable components of that idea. In this inevitable process an idea is stripped of all of its flavor and is reduced to a set of…
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NYC Progressive F# Tutorials 2012 in Retrospect
It was the best of times, it was the… Actually, it was all just fantastic. On the beginner track Chris Marinos, Phil Trelford, and Tomas Petricek worked tirelessly in teaching F#. I was thoroughly impressed with the quality of their tutorials and would recommend seeking any of them out if you wish to become more proficient…
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What Microsoft MVP means to me
It wasn’t long after college that I found myself blogging about the technology I was using on a regular basis. I have pretty good writing skills and am damn good with the code so soon after I was easily breaking 10K hits per post. Having a platform to share my ideas and knowledge was exhilarating…
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Musicians, Mechanics, and Mathematicians
Thank you all for your comments on my previous post, I appreciate the time you all took in sharing your perspectives very much. Many of you have brought up great analogies to demonstrate how you feel and in reading these responses I realized I must not have been very clear. There are some musical geniuses who…
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Why do most programmers work so hard at pretending that they’re not doing math?
In the early days programming was considered a subdiscipline of mathematics. In fact, the very first person to write an algorithm was renowned as a mathematical genius. However, somewhere along the way we forgot. We began to think of ourselves as something different, a profession not beholden to rigor or deep understanding of the models we create. It’s easy to see…
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2011 In Retrospect: A Year of Writing F# Professionally
For the past year I’ve been working almost entirely in F# and have found the experience to be everything I hoped it to be and better. In just six months I was able to bring a research project to fruition which has since made our company millions of dollars. F#’s terseness made algorithms a joy…
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Advice for Getting Started with F#
I had a great time at NYC Code Camp this last weekend. About half the people in my talk already knew F# and were there to talk about Type Providers, the other half just came to see what this F# thing was all about. This post is to help those in the second half begin their F#…
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Record Linkage Algorithms in F# – Extensions to Jaro-Winkler Distance (Part 3)
While writing the previous article on tokenized matching I realized I left out some important background information on Jaro-Winkler distance. First, there’s something important to know about the Jaro-Winkler distance: it’s not a metric distance and so does not obey the triangle inequality. That is, if you found the JW distance between strings A and B, and then…
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Imperative Pseudocode to Pure Functional Algorithm with Gale-Shapely and F#
Continuing from last time, let’s look at how one goes from imperative pseudocode to pure functional using Gale-Shapely as an example. Overall, to convert an algorithm from imperative to functional is a fairly simple process once you understand how to convert from a while loop to recursion with accumulators. This post is just a more advanced…