Strangelights

I’ll in London on the 10th/11th May giving a two day course entitle “Beginning F# Workshop” in conjunction with the lovely folks at Skills Matter. I think I give a fairly good description of the course on the workshop webpage, so I wanted to use this blog post to talk about why you would want to attend. I believe, as I stated in my book, that functional programming will be the next big wave in programming, and that F# will be one of the languages at the forefront of this functional programming renaissance. I don’t believe this will be sole driven by the move from one core processors to many core processors and the move towards parallel programming that this will create, though this will undoubtedly help. I believe functional programming is will be the next big wave in programming as functional languages provide better ways of raising the level of abstraction than procedural and object oriented programming languages do. Sadek Drobi has a nice talk on computation abstraction in he explains some of these new types of abstraction that functional programming languages offer. With the kind of systems we are building today, we are now ready to start working at these new levels of abstraction.

I’ve recently noticed that talks from Functional Programming eXchange, that I organized and spoke at, are now online. This is a great resource for people looking for some more advanced material on Functional Programming. So here are the videos:

I’m very happy to announce that FunctionalNHibernate has now been updated to work with the recently released Visual Studio 2010 release candidate. Also, it has now been setup to run on the codebetter build server. You can create a log on and download the latest binaries from here (you need an account but it’s very simple to create one).

It was TechDays this week and I was lucky enough to be invited to speak with Don Syme and Adam Granicz. Don gave a short introduction to mailboxes/agent programming in F# and Adam gave an introduction to IntelliFactory’s WebSharper project.

I’ve been working quite a lot on the FunctionalNHibernate project recently. I’ve implemented the following features:

It’s already fairly well documented that F# doesn’t play too well with NHibernate and Fluent NHibernate, although you can make it play a littler nice with a bit of effort. However there are a few fundamental problems with this approach. The first is F# class’ are not really designed to be data containers because that’s what its record type is for. The second is that F# class’ do not put too much emphasis on virtual methods as in functional programming we tend to using pass functions as values as a way to achieve polymorphism rather than virtual methods. Third and finally FluentNHibernate works with C#’s expression trees, it would be nice use F#’s quotation system instead.

This morning there was an unexpected knock at the door and a courier arrived with a large package. I was quite surprised as hadn’t ordered anything. It turned out that it was my box of author copies of “Beginning F#”. So I’m happy to announce that “Beginning F#” is finally here and if you’ve pre-ordered it will be with you shortly.

The functional programming exchange in London last Monday (7th Dec) when off really smoothly. We had just over 50 people, mostly from the south east of England, but a few had travelled from places like Scotland, Brussels and Holland to see us. I’d like to say big thanks to all the speakers for providing interesting and thought provoking talks. So, thanks to Sadek, Matthew, Anton, Ganesh, and Duncan. Also, a big thanks to Skills Matter for providing the location, logistics, pizza and beer. Photos and video from the event should start appearing soon, in the meantime Mike Hadlow has provided this nice run down of the day. Keep an eye on http://functionalpx.ning.com/ for the videos, but I’ll also be posting a notice here.

I’m very happy to announce the “Functional Programming eXchange” which will take place in London at Skills Mater head quarters on the 7th December. I’ve been involved in organizing a program which will cover F#, Erlang, Scala and Haskell. The program has been designed to interested both people actively involved in functional programming in industry and working programmers with an interest in functional programming would like to learn more about how they can use these two techniques in their day job. The program will include, me, as well as:

UPDATE:The talk tonight (29 Oct) at Zenika has been postoned till November due to unforeseen circumstances. I'll let you know the exact date as soon as it is confirmed. My apologies for this.