For Functional Programming eXchange 2012 and I’ve tried to put together a programming that mixes the best the functional programming community has to give. I wanted both talks that show how functional programming languages can be used more effectively and that show off new up and coming language and new language features. I also wanted talks that gave feedback from project that were implemented using functional languages. I’m pleased to say we have plenty of both. The day will kick off with David Pollak t[...]

Recently I sent a bit of time playing with Overtone. I’ve always been interested in music, but have little talent when it comes to playing instruments, so I really like the idea of a DSL for creating music. I was also inspired by one of my Christmas presents The Wave Watchers Companion to explore relationship between waves and sound. A secondary aim of playing with overtone was to learn a bit more about Clojure which is definitely one of the most interesting languages about at the moment. I tried to resist[...]

Just a quick note to say that my talk “The Combinator Approach to Programming Domain Specific Languages with F#” is now available on Skills Matter site. I’ve put the code on github. If you enjoyed the talk I’ll be giving it again at CodeKen, the conference formally know as Stackoverflow Dev Days, on 14th/15th November. Combinators are a really nice, and under appreciated, way to create DSLs and we go into them in depth on my Beginning F# course at Skills Matter. Book now for the march edition.

Ever since it was announced that Dart would be announced at GOTO conference I’ve been wonder what dart would be like. I thought I’d take the time put down my initial thoughts here. Is there a need for another language? Tim Anderson poses the question nicely here, so I thought I’d have a stab at answering it. There are a lot of programming languages in the world, so there would seem to be limited space for a new one. However, I think Google are creating this language for two reasons: 1) they want improve[...]

I have an idea for a type provider, so now that the type provider bits are finally publicly available I set to work building it. However it turns out just implementing a type provider is pretty tricky (not really that much of a surprise I supose), so I thought it was worth a quick blog post to run through the basics. A type provider is a class that implements the interface ITypeProvider (fullname Microsoft.FSharp.Core.CompilerServices.ITypeProder), which lives in the assembly FSharp.Core.dll. Its definiti[...]