A couple of months ago, I started working on an F# decision tree & random forest library, and pushed a first draft out in July 2013. It was a very minimal implementation, but it was a start, and my plan was to keep refining and add features. And then life happened: I got really busy, I began a very poorly disciplined refactoring effort on the code base, I second and third guessed my design - and got nothing to show for a while. Finally in December, I took some time off in Europe, disappeared in the French [...]

Some time ago I put together a small BERT serializer and BERT-RPC client for .Net called Filbert (which is another name for Hazelnut, that has the word bert and the letter F and at the time every F# library has a leading F in its name!). As an experimental project admittedly I hadn’t given too [...]

Many advances in programming language design are driven by some practical motivations. Sometimes, the practical motivations are easy to see - for example, when they come from some external change such as the rise of multi-core processors. Sometimes, discovering the practical motivations is a tricky task - perhaps because everyone is used to a certain way of doing things that we do not even see how poor our current solution is. The following two examples are related to the work done in F# (because this i[...]

Just under three weeks ago, Amazon announced the public availability of their new Kinesis service, a service which is designed to allow real-time processing of streaming big data. As an experiment I have put together a simple, actor-based customer appender for log4net which allows you to publish your log messages into a configured Kinesis stream. [...]