Taking its name from twitter, with a large nod towards Roald Dahl's cautionary tale, the twits is a twitter app that lets you visualize you network of friends on twitter. It’s available to try here. Before we go any further you should know that this software is in alpha status, i.e. not for the fait hearted. Here’s an image of the results below.
Back in February this year I spoke at TechDays Paris 2009, I’ve always enjoyed TechDays Paris so a big thanks to Eric Mittelette and his team for inviting me to speak. Also, many thanks Julien Laugel who help me review the presentation slides and also shared some his experiences using F# with the audience. A screen cast of this presentation is now available. The slides for this presentation are available on the slideshare.net site and the code from the slides is available here, except from the collective intelligence part which is available in its github project.
So this blog has been quite lately, well it never was the most active in the world. Anyway the good news is there are lots of other good F# resources on the web at the moment. Particually Lang.NET was a great source of F# videos, I was there myself, but I’ve spoke with a few people who were, and indeed there they told me there was lots of interest in F#.
F# is now available as part of the beta1 of Visual Studio 2010. I felt a strange sense of pride when I could select F# as the default language in Visual Studio:
A few people have noticed that a new book “Beginning F#” by me is available for pre-order on Amazon. I wanted to make it clear that this is the new title for the second edition of “Foundations of F#”. The publisher wanted the title change to make it clear that this was a complementary rather title to “Expert F#” rather than competing with it. It also reflects that during the rewrite that I’m focusing a lot on making the book more accessible to people with no functional programming experience.
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:
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.
(Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet recently; this is the first of several posts I’ll be making this morning)
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 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.