Taking the Coursera Probabilistic Graphical Models course has had me thinking a lot about complexity. Lately, program state complexity in the context of testing in particular. How many discrete tests would it take to ensure every combination of inputs is correct? Let’s do some back of the napkin math and see what we come up [...]

There is a very nice online book called "The F# Survival Guide", previously hosted at ctocorner.com. Unfortunately, for some reason that site is no longer available. Several F# community members have tried to work out why, but so far to no avail. In any case, the book is HTML and the most recent version is available at the internet archive web.archive.org.  So if you're looking to read it, here is a link to an archived edition of The F# Survival Guide.  Don

First of all, kudos to Michael Neel and everyone that put on CodeStock.  This was my first time attending CodeStock and to see such a well-run conference is always a pleasure. I know from experience that there’s a lot of work that goes in to making things run that smoothly. I got to attend a [...]

Regular readers of my blog will know that from time to time I post some historical notes related to the research projects I've been involved in at Microsoft Research. Recently, I was asked some historical questions about our work on .NET Generics in 2001. To help frame an answer, I thought I'd post one of our research project outputs from 2001 as part of the .NET Generics project.  The attached document is the "GC#" (Generic C#)  language design specification from December 2001, written by the Microsoft Re[...]