This is a part 3 of the series started in part 1 and part 2. One of the things that …Continue reading →

Recently, I had a few interesting discussions on F# code readability. One argument I often hear about F# is that by virtue of its succinctness, it increases the signal-to-noise ratio. I certainly found this to be true: when the entire code fits on your screen, and you don’t have to scroll around to figure out what is going on, navigating a code base becomes significantly simpler. Relatedly, because the F# syntax is so much lighter than C#, some of my coding habits evolved. I stick to the “one public type p[...]

I got a Pi for my birthday! A great excuse to get back into electronics. After unsuccessfully struggling to get the F# compiler to build under the stable version of mono for Debian Wheezy, I realised that F# programs work just fine if you build normally from a windows computer, throw in FSharp.Core.dll in the /bin/ and copy it over. So I have a setup now where I work with VS2012 / Sublime and sync the executable and libraries with WinScp (or indeed the Scp plugin for FAR Manager). Next up is to get access [...]

And the Journey converting “Machine Learning in Action” from Python to F# continues! Rather than following the order of the book, I decided to skip chapters 8 and 9, dedicated to regression methods (regression is something I spent a bit too much time doing in the past to be excited about it just right now), and go straight to Unsupervised Learning, which begins with the K-means clustering algorithm. So what is clustering about? In a nutshell, clustering focuses on the following question: given a set of obs[...]

In spite of being color blind, I am a visual guy – I like to see things. Nothing beats a chart to identify problems in your data. I also spend lots of time manipulating data in FSI, the F# REPL, and while solutions like FSharpChart makes it possible to produce nice graphs fairly easily, I still find it introduces a bit of friction, and wondered how complicated it would be to use Excel as a charting engine. Turns out, it’s not very complicated. The typical use case for generating charts in Excel is to first[...]