A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GALAXY FAR AWAY….. Having infiltrated the Empire’s data centre, you are not overly surprised to discover they are using some ancient system from the old republic days.  A brief look around reveals a monstrous legacy Empire Enterprise system.  It has a ORM you thought had died out millennia ago.  You can immediately see no less than 13 layers of inheritance, 6 levels of dependency injection, and some complete bastard has spread the evil EmpireAutoLogger all over the place Thankfull[...]

Over the last few days I have been learning Racket, a language derived from Scheme.  The main selling point of Racket is its extensive macro system that lets you do everything from the simplest macros through to redefining the entire language (yes you can even get rid of the parens!).  It is a programming language programming language. In fact, Racket is more of a customisable programming language infrastructure / engine with a default language on top of it. Now, we won’t get to anything too crazy in this[...]

Introduction Though the mystery man Don Syme, Father of F#, is generally heralded for various software based innovations and other computer related things, it transpires he has talents in other unrelated areas.  Specifically, Don is master cow herder (yes, as in moo-cows).  Whilst this might seem unlikely, I present to you a legendary but scarce video, with Don in action whilst attempting to get to work across the treachrous cow infested fields of Cambridge. Behold! (Watch the whole thing for a bonus cow a[...]

I am very excited to finally share the first version of my latest type provider, the Mixin Provider!  This post is quite long but you should read it all, this only scratches the surface really. Background   Code Generation in F# Code generation in any language is a double edged sword.  It is an extremely powerful technique used all over the place, often to great effect.  It can also turn into a complete nightmare with millions of often unnecessary and bloated lines of code, hard to find bugs, and hard to m[...]

I attended the first London meetup group for the D programming language last week with my friend David.  Near the end we had a chance to try and solve a cool programming problem called the secret santa challenge. disclaimer – I am a complete D 'lol newb' so there might be nicer stuff I could do with syntax etc!  Also I have not yet fixed my syntax highlighter to include auto, mixin, assert, and others The Challenge The secret santa problem is deceptively simple.  You are given a list of names like so. enum[...]