It’s fairly well know that Sequences or “seq”, the short hand for IEnumerable, are lazy. This has some interesting performance consequence I had not considered until recently. When we execute a line like: let lotsOfInts = Seq.map (fun x -> x + 1) (seq { 1 .. 1000000 }) The command executes almost instantaneously, despite the fact we’re creating a list of a million integers (Real: 00:00:00.001, CPU: 00:00:00.000 on my PC).  This is because everything is lazy; no actual work is done till the list is enumerated. Executing a command like: let lotsOfInts' = List.of_seq lotsOfInts Takes a significant amount of time...

I note on in a previous blog post that I’ve started creating an open source project for manipulating data. For the moment it’s mainly based around the idea of “Collective Intelligence”, but I hope to draw on influences from other sources as it evolves. I’ve reorganised the source so it’s a bit clearer and added some other concepts, notably a tool for accessing books from “Project Guttenberg” and the work I did on generic algorithms. For the moment it’s licensed under GPLv2. I’m not a licensing expert but I believe this gives protection to the source while allowing it to remain...

I’ve been interested in collective intelligence and machine learning for a while now. These too related fields centre round using statistical tools on large sets of data to make measurements and predictions. So when the UK’s Guardian newspaper announced their “Data-store”, a collection of data set open to the public I felt it was time to apply some of what I’ve learned to the data they were offer. I choose to apply hierarchal clustering to the data on world health. The idea of hierarchal clustering is to measure how similar data sets are then pair off the similar data sets to build a...

I will be giving a half day F# tutorial at the “Progressive .NET Tutorials” organised by Skills Matter. This will be an excellent 3 daylong event with 2 tracks featuring half day and full day Tutorials by Gojko Adzic, David Laribee, Hammet, Ian Cooper, Mike Hadlow, Scott Belware and Sebastien Lambla. My will be giving a half day tutorial on Wednesday May 13th (the last day of the event). I will be presenting 'F# Tutorial ', which will aim to give delegates the building blocks for using F# productively and to start having fun with it. For the full programme...

(Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet recently; this is the first of several posts I’ll be making this morning) I decided a little while ago that I’d like to change direction in my career and go back to consulting, after interviewing around a bit I decided to join ALTi. It was my first day on Monday, and so far I’m enjoying my first week, although obviously I’m just getting settled in. The thing I like most about the company so far is that they seem quite open to suggestions and seem will to let you develop your career in the direction...