Welcome to day 2 of the F# Advent Calendar in English, and don’t miss Scott Wlaschin’s introduction to property-based testing from yesterday. In A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens wrote of cold winters with snow as a matter of course. White Christmases were common during the Little Ice Age that lasted from the 1550s to the 1850s. Nowadays the chances of a snowfall on Christmas day are much lower, but the imagery of a white Christmas persists. In this post we’ll generate our snowflakes instead. Koch Snowf[...]

This weekend Evelina, Yan an I had the pleasure of speaking at f(by) the first dedicated functional conference in Belarus. It was a short hop by train from Vilnius to Minsk, where we had been attending Build Stuff. Sergey Tihon, of F# Weekly fame, was waiting for us at the train station to guide us to the hotel with a short tour of the city. The venue was a large converted loft space, by the river and not far from the central station, with great views over the city. The event attracted over 100 developers[...]

Last week Gian Ntzik gave a great talk at the F#unctional Londoners meetup on the Nessos Streams library. It’s a lightweight F#/C# library for efficient functional-style pipelines on streams of data. The main difference between LINQ/Seq and Streams is that LINQ is about composing external iterators (Enumerable/Enumerator) and Streams is based on the continuation-passing-style composition of internal iterators, which makes optimisations such as loop fusion easier. The slides (using FsReveal) and sampl[...]

Last week saw the fourth instalment of the annual Progressive F# Tutorials hosted at Skills Matter in London, with 8 sessions over 2 days and 2 tracks, to a full house. 2014 has been another exciting year in the F# community, with F# specific talks featuring heavily at major conferences, user groups popping up across the globe and F# sitting comfortably in the TIOBE top 20. Day 1 Don Syme kicked off t[...]

Verena Lowensburg was a Swiss painter and graphic designer, assocciated with the concrete art movement. I came across some of her work while searching for pieces by Richard Paul Lohse. Again I’ve selected some pieces and attempted to draw them procedurally. Spiral of circles and semi-circles Based on Verena Loewensburg’s Unititled, 1953 The piece was constructed from circles and semi-circles arranged around 5 concentric rectangles drawn from the inside-out. The lines of the rectangles are drawn in a [...]