In this post I’ll introduce a style of programming which may be totally unfamiliar and perhaps a bit magical to many readers. What if you could write a unit test for a problem and have your compiler automatically return a correct implementation? Call it "test only" instead of "test first." I’m going to translate the [...]

Intro I’m sure you would have all seen the highly addictive and annoying game 2048 by now (if not, follow the link and have a go now, don’t forget to come back here though! ).  Fellow F#er  @brandewinder wrote a bot that wins the game for you, subsequently turning it into an cool F# dojo.  It is London’s turn for this dojo next Thursday, so I figured before then I would have a go myself and do the obvious thing which is to turn it into a type provider :) 2048 TP Edition is available as part of my type prov[...]

This is the fifth post of my notes from Emerging Languages Camp last year. If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to read the Introduction to this series. Axiomatic Language Walter Wilson Homepage · Slides · Presentation One of the ways that you can describe a coding style is declarative versus imperative. That is, focusing on the desired result versus [...]

@StevenStrogatz posed a fun question this evening: If an elliptical swimming pool has a one-foot wide border around it, is the outer edge of the border also an ellipse?— Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz) June 28, 2014 People quickly realized the answer is “no,” but how to show it? I’ll let someone else do the formal proof, but a quick visualization makes it pretty obvious. Play around with the sliders below to see when the border is close to being an ellipse, and when it’s not. document.write(''); var [...]

Like many a good man, I too got caught into the 2048 trap, which explains in part why I have been rather quiet on this blog lately (there are a couple other reasons, too). In case you don't know what 2048 is yet, first, consider yourself lucky - and, fair warning, you might want to back away now, while you still have a chance. 2048 is a very simple and fun game, and one of the greatest time sinks since Tetris. You can play it here, and the source code is here on GitHub. I managed to dodge the bullet fo[...]