This weekend I had the pleasure of sitting on the Ocean Q&A panel at Revival 2014 in Wolverhampton. I worked at Ocean in Manchester in my early 20s on titles like Jurassic Park (PC & Amiga) and Addams Family Values (SNES & Megadrive). It was fun to reminisce about the good old days with other former Ocean employees and people who’d played the games. The panel closely coincided with the public release of The History of Ocean Software book by Chris Wilkins which was funded as a Kickstarter: There w[...]

Last month Grant Crofton popped down from Leeds to the F#unctional Londoners meetup at Skills Matter to run a fun hands on code golf session. The idea of code golf is to implement a specific algorithm in the fewest possible characters. This is not the kind of thing you should be doing in enterprise code, but it is fun, and an interesting way of exploring features in a programming language. On the night we attempted condensed versions of FizzBuzz and 99 bottles of beer, with Ross and I winning the first c[...]

Following on from F# week, Xamarin have been running a contest to build your first F# mobile app which ends today. If you missed it you can still enter, run an F# app and get a free F# T-shirt. Over the weekend I’ve put together a simple calculator app that includes units of measure support: Getting started I installed the latest version of Xamarin on my Mac. The happy path seems to be the stable release channel these days, as F# is now baked into the IDE. Once it’s installed you can start straight[...]

Yesterday I came across a handy loan payment calculator in C# by Jonathon Wood via Alvin Ashcraft’s Morning Dew links. The implementation appears to be idiomatic C# using a class, mutable properties and wrapped in a host console application to display the results. I thought it’d be fun to spend a few moments re-implementing it in F# so it can be executed in F# interactive as a script or a console application. Rather than use a class, I’ve plumped for a record type that captures all the required fields: [...]

In the northern hemisphere summer is nearly open us, and to celebrate the F#unctional Londoners are putting on a series of 3 free hands on coding sessions. The sessions are open to all levels of experience (and operating systems), and I believe will be a great opportunity to pick up new skills or extend existing ones. So bring your friends, your partners, your kids and your laptops for some coding fun.   F#unctional Londoners   Fractal Forest Dojo – Thursday June 26th In this hands on session, we'[...]