Tag: F#
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A safer way to use F# with SQL CLR
Every blog post I’ve read about using F# with SQL CLR involves turning off SQL CLR security for the entire database like so: alter database mydatabase set trustworthy on This is because there is not currently a “safe” FSharp.Core, and so even when building with –standalone you must load the assemblies in to SQL as…
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Developing an Algorithm in F#: Fast Rotational Alignments with Gosper’s Hack
This post is for the 7th day of the 2014 F# Advent Calendar. It has been said that functional languages can’t be as fast as their imperative cousins because of all of the allocation and garbage collection, this is patently false (as far as F# is concerned at least) largely because the CLR has value types.…
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My 2013 F# Year in Review
It’s been a great year for F# with the blossoming of the fsharp.org working groups. It’s been amazing watching the community come together to form a movement outside of Microsoft. This is most certainly the long term future of F#, protected from the whims of layer upon layer of management. Who knows, in the coming year we…
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The Promise of F# Language Type Providers
In most software domains you can safely stick with one or two languages and, because the tools you are using are fairly easy to replicate, you’ll find almost anything you might need to finish your project. This isn’t true in data science and data engineering however. Whether it be some hyper-optimized data structure or a cutting edge machine…
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Come join me at the SkillsMatter F# Tutorials NYC 2013
Last year was our first NYC F# tutorials and they were just amazing (you can read about them here) but this year’s are going to be even better. We’ve got a lineup including some of the most talented teachers in the F# community, and the tickets are extremely inexpensive as conferences and training events go.…
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In Retrospect: QCon NYC 2013 (and a conversation with Rich Hickey on languages)
QCon NYC was the most refreshing conference I’ve been to in a very long time. Perhaps it’s partially because I’ve lingered too long in Microsoft circles, or maybe it’s just been too long since I went to a large conference. In any case, the speaker lineup was just chock full of brilliant minds from all over…
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On Type Safety, Representable States and Erlang
Close your eyes and imagine your program as a function that takes a set of inputs and produces a set of outputs. I know this may seem overly simple, but a set of actions in a GUI can be thought of as a set of inputs, and a set of resulting side effects to a…
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Setting up F# Interactive for Machine Learning with Large Datasets
Before getting started with Machine Learning in F# Interactive it’s best to prepare it for large datasets so you don’t get blindsided with strange errors when you happen to cross the line. The good news is it’s a simple process that should only take a few minutes. The first step is to go into the…
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Levenshtein Distance and the Triangle Inequality
Levenshtein distance is one of my favorite algorithms. On the surface it seems so very simple, but when you spend some time thinking hard on it deep insights are waiting to be had. The first and most important thing about Levenshtein distance is it’s actually a metric distance. That is, it obeys the triangle inequality. For…
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What is good API design?
Some say that API design is one of the hardest things in programming. A few even go as far as to say you should have at least 10 years of experience to even attempt it. While I think this process can be sped up almost an order of magnitude by good mentorship, at one time or another…