Tag: Programming
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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…
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Record Linkage in F# – Token Matching, Stable Marriages and the Gale-Shapley algorithm
This post was originally published September 13th, 2011. Initially, one of the biggest problems I found when trying to marry records was the god awful quality of much of data I often have to work with. It’s mostly old mainframe and database data with truncated fields, limited character sets and fields with nonsensical contents. Even…