Strangelights

I find conversations in twitter hard to follow. For a start they’re backwards, the first thing you see is the last item in the conversation. Add to that the fact there very sporadic, it’s difficult to see which tweets users are reacting to, and it doesn’t make for a great conversation experience. I put together TwitMemento with the aim of fixing that. Firstly, it changes the order you see tweets in, instead of new ones being inserted at the top, they're inserted at the bottom, like a normal chat client or message board. Secondly Twit Memento also automatically detects groups of people talking to each other and displays them together, correctly ordering the tweets.

Last week Skills Matter quietly announced that they will be hosting a new edition of the Functional Programming eXchange on 18th March 2011 at there head quarters in Holburn, London:
http://skillsmatter.com/event/open-source-dot-net/functionalpx-2011

The role of a type system is to prove some property of you program is correct. The role of module system is dived your program into manageable/understandable chunks. An OO class confuses these too roles.

People often ask me what functional programming is all about and why is it useful. In an attempt to answer this question in a way that is relevant to object oriented programmers it struck me it might be useful to look at what people find useful in modern object oriented programming. Once we know what programmers like about OOP, specifically what problems it helps them solve that structured programming didn’t, we can look again at FP and look at how it approaches these problems.

I’ve finally got round to sorting out the code base to strangelights.com which was getting a big out of hand. Not much should have changed, but I’ve killed off lots of old files that weren’t being used and upgrade to the latest version of subtext. Now things are a little more under control, it should make it easier to update some of the out dated content, so hopefully you’ll see these changes over the next few weeks and months.

A few people have accessed recently if they could have my slides from the “Combinators, DSLs, HTML and F#” talk I gave at functional programming exchange 2009. So I decided to add them to slide share.

At Progressive.NET one of the sessions I attended was Sebastien Lambla’s talk on OpenWrap. OpenWrap is a package management system for .NET projects. I’m excited about this project for a very simple reason: it’s something the .NET Open Source community desperately needs.

I’ve been in London for the past few days. I arrived Tuesday afternoon and gave at talk at “The F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group” on the Tuesday evening. The talk was entitled “Using Language Oriented Programming to Execute Computations on the GPU” and thanks to the efficiency of the good folks at Skills Matter the talk is already available on line. The event was very well attended, with around 50 people turning up. The talk covers more the Language Oriented Programming aspects than the knitty gritty details for detailing with the GPU and the audience seemed to enjoy it. It was a fun evening and good to meet Carolyn Miller, who started the group, as well fellow F# Guru’s Jon Harrop and Phil Trelford.

In .NET strings are immutable. I think most .NET programmers agree that this is a good thing, as it generally makes code that works with strings safer and more predictable. However, operations that involve large amounts of string manipulation perform poorly because each time a string concatenation occurs then both strings must be copied. His often leads people to believe that all immutable objects will perform poorly. The aim of the article is to show that this is not the case, or at least it’s not as black and white as you may think. Specifically we’re going to compare how.NET strings differ considerable in performance characteristics to F#’s immutable lists.

A few days ago Chris Wille, the man behind #Develop contacted me to say that #Develop had been accepted on the Google summer of code scheme. Essentially Google summer of code means that Google will pay CS students to spend their summer writing code for open source projects. Chris told me one area they are interested in extending is the F# integration into #Develop; particularly they’d like to get the auto-completion working. So if you’re a CS student on the lookout for a summer job, you could end up being paid by Google to work on F#! Contact me if you are interested.