Fizz-Buzz or Bizz Buzz is a word game, popularized by Jeff Atwood in the article: Why Can’t Programmers… Program? The game has been turned into a simple programming test: Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of 3 print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of 5 print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both 3 and 5 print "FizzBuzz". If you’re involved in hiring programmers then the article is probably worth a read. This kind of problem ca[...]

This week I had pleasure of meeting Vagif Abilov on Tomas Petricek and I’s Advanced F# course at Skills Matter. Vagif mentioned a Ruby implementation of Conway’s Game of Life being squeezed into 140 characters for tweeting and how that might look in F#. Here’s the 140 characters of Ruby: life=->g,s{(0..s*s-1).map{|i|->n{n==3||(g[i]&&n==2)||nil} [[g[i-s-1],g[i-s],g[i-s+1],g[i-1],g[i+1],g[i+s-1],g[i+s],g[i+s+1]] .compact.count]}}   And 137 characters of F#: let f s g = g|>List.mapi(fun i x->match x,Seq.sumBy[...]

The first stable release of the Silverlight 5 Multi-Window Controls project is now available on CodePlex which brings external window support to the ChildWindow and ContextMenu. So what’s next if anything? I came across Tim Heur’s Silverlight FloatableWindow project on CodePlex, that adapts the ChildWindow control for non-modal use, and has attracted over 10,000 downloads! With Silverlight 5 it should be possible to have floating windows that in desktop mode (also known as out-of-browser or OOB mode) c[...]

It’s just before lunch and nearly 4 hours into the 8 hour game writing competition and we have about 200 lines of F# and some sprites on the screen. Keys: Z=left, X=right, Q=up, A=down, Space=shoot As you can see we've gone for a bit of a retro look! And this is what we submitted: Watch the video: Source code: https://bitbucket.org/ptrelford/flinteastwood

Less than a month to go now until the first FP event of this year – the Functional Programming eXchange at Skills Matter in London on March 16th. Robert Pickering has put together another great line up including on the F# side Tomas Petricek on F# 3.0’s Type Providers and Loic Denuziere on F# in large scale web apps. There’s also a good number of talks from members of the Clojure, Scala and Haskell communities. Rob lists plenty of reasons to come to Functional Programming eXchange 2012, on his blog. Th[...]