Since I submitted my PhD thesis in December, I had a little bit of time to finish some of the things that I wanted to do for a really long time, but never quite found time to actually do them. This included getting the R provider to work on Mac and also creating a new web site for my various functional programming trainings and books. I even have a nice domain name: www.functional-programming.net The page also discusses a couple of business reasons for looking into functional programming. So, if you'r[...]

I will admit it, I got a bit upset by James McCaffrey’s column in MSDN magazine this month, “Gradient Descent Training Using C#”. While the algorithm explanations are quite good, I was disappointed by the C# sample code, and kept thinking to myself “why oh why isn’t this written in F#”. This is by no means intended as a criticism of C#; it’s a great language, but some problems are just better suited for different languages, and in this case, I couldn’t fathom why F# wasn’t used. Long story short, I just co[...]

Tweet A friend of mine, Roger Engelber, pointed me to a nice article  on doing functional programming in Lua. The article detailed the steps to generate a flame like effects using a simple particle system. Of course, it naturally lead to me trying to do the same in Elm!   To translate the approach was

Tweet Whilst talking with an ex-colleague, a question came up on how to implement the Stable Marriage problem using a message passing approach. Naturally, I wanted to answer that question with Erlang! Let’s first dissect the problem and decide what processes we need and how they need to interact with one another. The stable marriage

Tweet It’s very uncharacteristic of me, but I went to a session on the product management track at QCon London – Melissa Perris’ “The Bad Idea Terminator”. Having gone in the room with the expectation of coming out not much wiser, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in one of the best talks at