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F# DSL for graphics?
f#dsljava

Has any one thought of taking advantage of F# DSL capabilities and .NET 3.0's fantastic graphics abilities to create a DSL for graphics? I'm thinking specifically of Chris Oliver's F3. His language sits on top of Java and can do wonderful stuff with just a few lines of simple code. F3 is not an embedded domain specific language so F# version would probably have a bit of syntactic strangeness; however, the ability to quickly link data to a visual, interactive screen will be great.

Another example of a DSL for graphics is processing (processing.org). Processing seems to have several built-in primitives for lines, circles, colors, etc., but other than that is basically java (heavy reliance on mutable state).

I know there is xaml, but Im sure F# gurus can do better.

.

I'm working on it! My forthcoming book F# for Scientists will contain a lot of information on how to spawn visualizations from a running F# interactive session, in order to visualize data interactively while you analyze it. This is the essence of many technical computing environments like Matlab and Mathematica.

I'm also going to write a commercial package that makes this as easy as possible for F# programmers. I believe this will be an excellent low cost alternative to Matlab and Mathematica, whilst retaining the performance of F#.

I don't believe it is necessary (or even wise) to create a fully-fledged DSL. I think the F# language is perfect for this kind of work as it is.

Cheers,
Jon.

By on 3/8/2007 9:53 AM ()

Jon, do your examples include taking a "XAML snapshot" of the visualization as opposed to an image or movie?

By on 3/12/2007 12:12 AM ()

Hi Mike,

We haven't actually used any XAML in this work. We've gone old-school and used Managed DirectX for the rendering and defined a scene graph in F# that renders automatically from an interactive session.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the resources to teach us WPF just weren't around when we started. The second is that WPF is inherently imperative in style. It has mutability everywhere and that is bad bad bad as far as ease of use is concerned.

We'll publish a tutorial on how to do this kind of work in one of the visualization articles in our new F# Journal. We may well also ship a product based on this, a kind of visualization toolbox for F#.

As far as the language is concerned, F# already provides almost everything you want for this kind of work. The only notable exception is optional function arguments.

Cheers,
Jon.

By on 4/16/2007 11:26 PM ()

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